Volume 67, Issue 3

It seems that the concept of culture is becoming ever more ambivalent. On the one hand, since the 20th century nearly every topic or object can be perceived as a product of culture or as an expression of a specific cultural subdomain. On the other hand, we are witnessing a return of identitarian movements which use culture as a normative concept to designate the substantial unity of a “we” and separate this unity from other cultures and people. Against this back-drop, the article traces back the concept of culture to the specific situation of modernity, which could be characterized by the loss of substance and the challenge of contingency in all fields of the lifeworld. The essay argues that, emerging in this modern situation, culture is not defined by a specific content or a set of objects, but is used rather as a way of putting one’s own position into question. Seeing things through the lens of culture implies that the actual given comes into view as something that has developed socially and historically. From such a perspective, culture is neither an arbitrary concept nor a substantial unity but allows for a critical reflection on the present.

Inspired to some extent by the work of Thomas Kuhn, Ignorance Studies seeks to grapple with the implications that follow from the idea that on a theoretical level we can hardly ever know that we have approached truth. In order to test theories, we would need to have access to empirically raw, theoretically unadorned facts and to confront them with theoretically diverse or contradictory accounts of how to make sense of them. It’s the nature of the case that we are not able to penetrate to such a pure point of origin for things. The words that we use to describe them are already suffused with biases and distortions that limit what we can say about them. Our relationship to phenomena inside us and to things outside us always subsists in a symbolically mediated, indirect medium. Our efforts to be either before or after this state of symbolic mediation generally land us in a state of deepened awareness of the extent of the prolongation of the middle. The conceptualized entity is for all intents and purposes the entity we relate to. The paper argues that given the limits to certainty highlighted by Ignorance Studies, our political institutions need to be responsive to the priorities enshrined in democratic theory to ensure that the policies pursued by any given government are reflective of the needs and the wishes of the majority of the people.

Many epistemic attitudes including belief and knowledge have already been examined to determine the extent to which they can be attributed to collectives. The epistemological literature on explanatory understanding and objectual understanding, on the other hand, has focused almost exclusively on individual subjects. However, there are many situations that can be described by sentences of the form “We understand P ”, “We understand why p ”, “Group G understands P ”, or “ G understands why p ”. As I shall show, these situations can be classified into five categories: distributive, common, joint, deferential, and cooperative understanding. Based on a definitional scheme, according to which the general concept of understanding has a cognitive component, a factivity component, and an epistemic-pro-attitude component, this paper aims to analyse these five types.

This paper takes into account Bertrand Russell’s, Francis H. Bradley’s, and Immanuel Kant’s arguments about “what is the real Julius Caesar” to examine (i) Russell’s characterization of analytic philosophy as a “new philosophy”, born as a revolt against idealism, and (ii) the actual relationship between Bradley and Kant. In order to understand who Russell was actually revolting against, we analyse the features of Bradley’s idealism and investigate how he understood and interpreted Kant’s transcendental revolution. By using the notion of Julius Caesar as a cogent comparative case study, we show that Bradley’s reading of Kant was not well-grounded. Therefore, we argue that Bradley’s interpretation of Hegel’s idealism was also unconventional. This misunderstanding in turn shaped and characterised Russell’s revolt against idealism. As a result, we show that analytic and continental philosophy began to part ways with the birth of what Russell calls new philosophy much earlier than their encounter at Davos. The reasons for this parting can be found in British idealists’ erroneous interpretation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy.

This paper analyses the methodological writings of nineteenth-century historian Johann Gustav Droysen. It explores how Droysen integrates the political and methodological aspects of historiography. The paper shows that Droysen relies on a procedure of “affirmative genealogy” which, in turn, is based on a concept of historical continuity. By Droysen’s account, historical continuity enables “historical understanding”; and the understanding of historical continuities provides the statesman – the “practical historian” – with a solid basis for political decision making.

This paper argues that besides the critical and historically informed genealogies of his later work, Nietzsche also sketched out genealogies that are not historically situated and that display an under-appreciated affirmative aspect. The paper begins by looking at two early examples of such genealogies where datable historical origins are clearly not at issue, which raises the question of what kind of origins Nietzsche is seeking. It is argued that these genealogies inquire into practical origins – into the original point of certain conceptual practices given certain needs – and that this reflects Nietzsche’s instrumentalist approach to concepts . It is then argued that this focus lends the genealogies an affirmative dimension, because they present their object as naturalistically intelligible and practically indispensable. Finally, it is shown how the nature and limits of this affirmative dimension can be tentatively sharpened by connecting it to Nietzsche’s later notion of an economic justification of morality.

There is an eye-catching similarity in structure between Paul Rée’s Origin of Moral Sensations and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals . Accordingly, the Genealogy has been understood as a riposte to Rée. I will argue in this paper that Nietzsche distances himself from Rée not only by developing alternative genealogies for moral concepts and institutions. Nietzsche’s main aim in criticizing Rée is to develop his own genealogical method that aims for historical adequacy, psychological adequacy, distinction of cause and function, acceptance of partial historical opacity and perspectivism.

This paper focuses on the relation of genealogy and critique in Nietzsche’s late philosophy. It is argued that the late Nietzsche distinguishes between genealogy and critique. The genealogy of morality is a descriptive endeavour that shows the origin of values in processes of life. The critique of morality assesses the value of values from the perspective of life. It is argued that the concept of life is at the core of Nietzsche’s critical project and thus his fundamental standard. The paper also examines the role of the genealogical method in Nietzsche’s critical project. It is shown that the genealogy of values prepares their critique. Moreover, Nietzsche regards the alleged epistemic success of his genealogies as an indirect confirmation of the superiority of his evaluative position, i. e. of his affirmation of life.

This paper aims to present the current debates in contemporary inclusion research in a structured manner and to highlight some systematic weaknesses. Although one cannot speak of a uniform research program in the strict sense, theoreticians of systems theory and inequality research in particular have taken up this young research subject. While within systems-theory approaches, inclusion is framed from the perspective of a functionalist social theory, inequality research has a rather socio-critical impetus which treats exclusion as a social problem. My thesis is that both approaches suffer from a lack of complexity regarding their concept of inclusion. While systems-theory approaches fail to include the ethical and political dimension of inclusion, inequality research is inadequate with regard to the descriptive dimension.