It is not at once evident what is meant by “the question of the history of philosophy.” This essay sets forth a way of looking at that question by locating it on the path taken by Nietzsche’s consideration of the question of the philosophy of history.

This article aims at making Heidegger’s understanding of history fruitful for a consideration of history that both takes into account the complexity and multitude of historical lineages and also pays attention to smaller historical events. After revisiting Heidegger’s understanding of history in terms of a history of being and our being-historical, the author brings into play the notion of rhythm. She thinks of rhythms of history in terms of durations of historical configurations of things and events in relation to their beginnings and endings (their rhythmic caesura), and in relation to other historical confi gurations. This leads to an understanding of history in terms of being-historical that does not simply indicate things happening in time, but instead focuses on the happening that determines how things appear and are deployed.

I argue that in Julia Kristeva’s concept of negativity, conceived of as the recuperation, through transformation, of a traumatic remnant of the past, we can find a parallel to what Theodor Adorno, following Walter Benjamin, calls a mimesis that in its emphasis on non-identity is able to remain faithful to the ban on graven images interpreted materialistically rather than theologically. A connection between negativity and the theological ban on images is suggested in Adorno’s claim that a ban on positive representations of utopia leads to a practice of negating the negative, that is, of exposing the injustices of modern life. Both Adorno and Kristeva discern in contemporary art a capacity to critique modernity and envision a better world, but insist that this art must not represent what it indicates. I also examine Benjamin’s writings on photography in order to argue that a mimesis that respects the ban on graven images moves us beyond the systematic optimism of the Hegelian dialectic, and extends the philosophy of history into the unknown of the unconscious.

This essay explores the familiar German ideology according to which a revolution in thought would, in varying proportions, precede, succeed, accommodate, and generally upstage a political revolution whose defining feature was increasingly thought to be its founding violence: the slide from 1789 to 1793. Germany thus sets out to quarantine the political threat of revolution while siphoning off and absorbing the revolution’s intensity and energy for thinking as such. The essay holds that this structure corresponds to the psychoanalytic logic of trauma: the dissolution of the event into a missed event, and the hypertrophic investment in the trivial, the non-event, the negligible remainder.

This paper investigates the fragmentation required of the philosophy of history in light of three key moments in its formation: German Idealism’s desire to see freedom realized in the world, the death of God, and the disasters of the twentieth century. I argue that Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot respond to these threads of the philosophy of history with revolutionary imperatives that belong to no program or project, imperatives that both reorganize and destructure the work of education, affirmations of transience and unmediated violence. I argue, following their lead, that any philosophy of history today must begin in a refusal of state power and the mediated violence of contemporary forms of community.

This essay deals with the function of Kant’s category of the Apperzeption in what we today call the “new metaphysics” of German Idealism. It is an important question because Kant’s thought is well known for his critique of metaphysics. But the category was essentially problematical and triggered answers provided in the emerging “new metaphysics.” The essay will follow the guidance to that Kantian category in Martin Bondeli’s book of 2006, Apperzeption und Erfahrung. Kants transzendentale Deduktion im Spannungsfeld der frühen Rezeption und Kritik. In my discussion it will become apparent at what critical points various new departures, e.g., those taken by Jacobi, Schlegel, Schelling, and Hegel, have led to well-profiled positions in the movement which is today known as “German Idealism,” and anyone familiar with its influence should also be able to discern how those positions influenced the future of Continental thought.

While ideals are by nature unrealizable, there are, nevertheless, many contexts in which their pursuit can be of enormous benefit. It may seem ironic but is a fact of life that the guidance afforded by “unrealistic” ideals can prove to be of enormous practical benefit.

The recent re-evaluation of Schelling’s work has blossomed interest and research into a number of Schelling’s core ideas. Amongst these Schelling’s analysis of God, the creative act and human freedom have been amongst the most explored. Much less explored has been his theory of temporality, a theory which not only underpins but is essential to understanding properly these other insights. It is the goal of this essay to correct that oversight by offering some initial remarks concerning Schelling’s theory of temporality, a topic which is rarely explicitly addressed within his work. This it does by analysing closely the passages within his oeuvre wherein the topic is most explicitly treated and by addressing the ontological theory implied therein.

Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man are generally recognized as crucial documents in the development of modern aesthetics away from rule-based conceptions of objectivity. This paper claims that they are also, in crucial ways, circular. In both Kant and Schiller, aesthetic taste turns out to be grounded in the realm of the social in a way that challenges the idealist notion that aesthetic evaluation and education would—or should—occur against the backdrop of humanity in general, rather than of concrete communities. The threat of conceptual circularity, I claim, is thus directly tied to the ineradicable significance of social circles for the articulation of Kant’s and Schiller’s aesthetics.

In his doctoral dissertation On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Arthur Schopenhauer there outlines a critique of Euclidean geometry on the basis of the changing nature of mathematics, and hence of demonstration, as a result of Kantian idealism. According to Schopenhauer, Euclid treats geometry synthetically, proceeding from the simple to the complex, from the known to the unknown, “synthesizing” later proofs on the basis of earlier ones. Such a method, although proving the case logically, nevertheless fails to attain the raison d’être of the entity. In order to obtain this, a separate method is required, which Schopenhauer refers to as “analysis,” thus echoing a method already in practice among the early Greek geometers, with however some significant differences. In this essay, I here discuss Schopenhauer’s criticism of synthesis in Euclid’s Elements, and the nature and relevance of his own method of analysis.

Kant objects on principle to any duty of moral self-perfection that would aim at the moral self-perfection of another person. Yet, despite the apparent barrier posed by the introspective technique of self-perfecting effort, I argue that such a duty is both possible and desirable as a part of moral friendship. Through mutual sincere efforts at self-disclosure, we escape the prison of mutual distrust which otherwise characterizes social life and consolidate the very sincerity necessary for moral improvement.

Many recent discussions of aesthetics have suggested that a genuine dialogue between philosophy and art is impossible. This essay aims to countersuch claims by arguing that philosophical thinking about art need not be either dismissive or domineering. The authors argue that a model for a productive dialogue between philosophy and art can be found by means of a comparative reading of two seemingly very different philosophies of art: those of Schopenhauer and Heidegger. The overall philosophical positions of these two thinkers are often at odds with each other. However, a careful examination of their views of art reveals a fundamental connection between art and truth, a connection that makes artworks indispensable counterparts for philosophical thinking, without at the same time undermining their autonomy.

For phenomenology, the study of appearances and the ways they come together to present a world, the question of the ego presents special difficulties. The ego, itself, is not an appearance; it is the subject to whom appearances appear. As such, it cannot appear. As the neo-Kantian, Paul Natorp expresses this:“The ego is the subjective center of relation for all contents in my consciousness. . . . It cannot itself be a content and resembles nothing that could be a content ofconsciousness.” Husserl will wrestle throughout the whole of his career with the issue of how to handle phenomenologically an ego that cannot be considered asa content of consciousness. In this article, I will outline the stages of his journey toward resolving this question.

This essay explores similarities in the arguments of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin in order to claim, against the commonplace assumptionthat social actionism is the only legitimate mode of political engagement, that actionism bears within it both fear and refusal of critical thought. In contrast, theauthor argues that the works of these two thinkers offer an alternative approach to political regeneration: The attentiveness of speculative thought and interpretation to distortion, to the accumulated garbage of history, and to thought’s own powerlessness or lack of efficacy in the world is necessary for a realization of the possibilities for real political change. On this reading, speculative philosophical thought is tasked with developing the capacity to sustain remembrance of the horrors of the past and the demand for critical thought placed by those horrors upon our own mutilated capacity for thinking.

In this paper I consider Benedetto Croce’s interpretation and critique of Hegel’s dialectic in Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel (1906)and I compare it with a very similar critique elaborated by Gilles Deleuze around sixty years later (in Différence et répetition, 1968, Nietzsche et la philosophie,1962 and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? 1991). Even if they are two very different authors, belonging to very different traditions and contexts, both Croce andDeleuze criticise Hegel with a very similar argument, namely by saying that Hegel did not adequately take into account the concept of difference, and subordinated it to opposition (or negation). In addition, albeit by taking different roads, both Croce and Deleuze thought that philosophy has its own specific logic, and this logic is a logic of concept.

Although there has been consistent interest in Marx and Marxism there has been little sustained interest in the origins of Marx’s ethical thought and his relation to the German philosophical tradition as a whole. Work has been done linking Marx to Fichte, and a great deal more linking him to Hegel. However, the fundamental concept joining them all is recognition, or interpersonal relations in general. In this regard, none of the German thinkers can be understood withoutfirst grasping their understanding of the human person as one among many. This article begins this process for Marx. Although some literature has been devotedto the explication of Marx’s notion of species-being it is sparse and dated. In this article I proceed to reiterate how important species-being is as the foundationto Marx’s ethical philosophy. However, my main focus is on simply how to understand the concept itself. I, therefore, devote the majority of the article to ananalysis of Marx’s use of the concept in his early work as well as his critique of Ludwig Feuerbach’s use of it. This account provides the basis for understandingMarx’s concept of human essence and is the beginning of a project of rephrasing Marxian ethics around the concept of recognition thus reconnecting him to theGerman philosophical tradition.