Volume 66, Issue 6

It can be argued that we live in a golden age for the history of philosophy: more relevant historiographical works in the field are being published today than ever before. The present paper tries to explain this as an effect of the exponential quantitative and qualitative expansion of philosophy, its subdisciplines and its fields of research since at least the mid-twentieth century. It then explores some of the consequences of these current trends and the challenge they represent for any relevant effort in history of philosophy today.

What is the nature of evil action? My thesis is that perpetrators and victims of evil inhabit an asymmetrical relation of power; the strength of the more powerful party lies in its ability to exploit the other’s fundamental vulnerability, and the weaker party is vulnerable precisely insofar as it is directly dependent on the more powerful party for the satisfaction of its fundamental needs. The fundamental vulnerabilities that are exploited correspond to features essential to our humanity (ontological), moral personhood (personal), and individuality (characteristic). These kinds of vulnerabilities are both constituted by and engender fundamental needs and give rise to direct dependencies on others to satisfy or to refrain from interfering with the satisfaction of fundamental needs. The unambiguous exploitation by the more powerful agent on whom the vulnerable directly depend is characteristic of evil action. Although I do not claim that the exploitation of ontological, personal, and characteristic vulnerabilities necessarily results in evil, it does typify it.

Our reply to Fabian Freyenhagen’s article “Was ist orthodoxe Kritische Theorie?” (DZPhil 65.3 [2017], 456-469) raises the question whether his proposal that Critical Theory only “be adequately and appropriately critical” without a program of justification spares the search for any general criteria. Answering negatively we conversely want to recall, particularly with regard to Horkheimers’s and Adornos’s Dialectic of Enlightment as well as Habermas‘s concept of an emancipatory interest, that such a criterion as a normative foundation of critique is crucial not only for systematical purposes, but also recognised as necessary in this respect by Adorno, who Freyenhagen wants to play off against programs of justification. Critical Theory needs to be clear in this respect. Against this background we are questioning Freyenhagen‘s recourse to an “interest in abolishing social injustice” as the “only criterion for Critical Theory.” Because Freyenhagen ignores the fact that Critical Theory has been understood by its representatives in a twofold manner – as a theoretical program of justification for one and secondly as a cultural diagnosis – his plea for an orthodox Critical Theory is endangered by decisionism.

The architect who plans and designs our living environment in town and country can neither think exclusively technologically nor act completely independently. Rather, his designs and actions are always in moral relation to the environment, i. e. to nature and landscape as well as to the city/town or the people who live daily with and within the built space and thus have a kind of effective group affiliation. But to what extent does architecture – in the sense of Hegel’s phrase the “sensuous in the meaningful” – already possess ethical implications?

In his famous essay “Der moderne Denkmalkultus. Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung” from 1903, the Austrian historian and art theorist Alois Riegl pondered why it is that the modern observer is able to appreciate the monuments of the past. It seems an odd question. The nineteenth century was obsessed with history; its artists and architects were often accused of appreciating nothing but the past. Yet, Riegl’s question is prescient. If, as the historicists had long professed, there are no absolute or eternal standards in art – if the value of art and architecture is relative, changing with time and circumstance – then logically, the past should be inaccessible to us. How come it is not? Riegl’s seemingly naïve question sums up historicism’s most pressing dilemmas and reveals the epochal determinism lurking in nineteenth-century Zeitgeist-thinking. This essay investigates Riegl’s attempted answers and their intellectual presuppositions.

Architecture is about buildings, and consequently, reflecting philosophically on architecture comprises asking what buildings are. The question seems easy to answer using everyday concepts, refined, if necessary, by referring to concepts from civil engineering or building legislation. Philosophical interest is raised mainly when time enters into the problem. This paper argues that the identity of buildings through time cannot be reduced to the identity of their designations, their materials or their locations in space and time. Instead, it proposes to construe buildings as Peircean sign processes. The identity of a building then becomes a function of the maintenance of sign relations by value-guided communities.