The present religious constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany is the product of protracte... more The present religious constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany is the product of protracted historical conflicts and political settlements that began in the sixteenth century. The mediation of these conflicts and settlements and the piecemeal establishment of the constitution was the achievement of imperial public law and diplomacy. In fact, what would become the basic form of this constitution — a state-managed multi-confessionalism — had been installed in the core state of Brandenburg-Prussia by the end of the seventeenth century, entirely under the aegis of the Hohenzollern monarchy and its judicial advisers. Given that Germany did not become a territorial state until late in the nineteenth century, and did not become an electoral democracy until the early twentieth century, the paper investigates the implications of the presence of a non-democratic religious constitution within a modern electoral democracy.
Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany, 2001
We began this book by contesting the view of early modern German intellectual history as a dialec... more We began this book by contesting the view of early modern German intellectual history as a dialectical progression leading to Kant. We have since discovered that this historiography is anything but a mistake. It is, in fact, a central weapon in the ongoing intellectual civil war between civil and metaphysical philosophy. This historiography first appeared in the dialectics through which Kant represents his own transcendence of the philosophies that preceded his. In using the figure of homo duplex to organise his intellectual antinomies, Kant was able to reduce the colliding cultural worlds seen at Halle to a series of neatly paired intellectual oppositions – between rationalism and voluntarism, idealism and empiricism – which could be resolved through the cultivation of a particular intellectual deportment. This method was then used by his early adherents – such as the theologian Carl Friedrich Stäudlin – to write Kant-centred histories of philosophy (Hochstrasser , –). Like Kant, Stäudlin was centrally preoccupied with reconciling moral philosophy and Christian theology; and he was among the first to use the metaphysical hermeneutics of Kant’s Religion to marginalise Pufendorf for ‘failing’ to achieve this goal (Stäudlin ). Never forgiven for its detranscendentalising of ethics and desacralising of politics, at the end of the eighteenth century civil philosophy was driven from Protestant arts faculties by Kant’s renewal of Schulmetaphysik, finding itself increasingly restricted to the teaching of law and politics. If, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many historians still treat the civil philosophers as failing to reconcile rationalism and voluntarism in a morally grounded politics, this is surely testimony to the long hegemony of post-Kantian philosophical history, which is perhaps only now beginning to break down. In making its own contribution to this disintegrative process, this book has offered a redescription of Kant’s practical philosophy, including its dialectics. Kant’s philosophy is best understood as a modification of a
Page 1. IDEAS IN CONTEXT The Secularisation of the Confessional State The Political Thought of Ch... more Page 1. IDEAS IN CONTEXT The Secularisation of the Confessional State The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius Ian Hunter ... THE SECULARISATION OF THE CONFESSIONAL STATE The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius IAN HUNTER University of Queensland ...
Although history is the pre-eminent part of the gallant sciences, philosophers advise against it ... more Although history is the pre-eminent part of the gallant sciences, philosophers advise against it from fear that it might completely destroy the kingdom of darkness—that is, scholastic philosophy—which previously has been wrongly held to be a necessary instrument of theology.
Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is now identified as an index of ... more Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is now identified as an index of the current state of literary history and theory. The significance of this topic stems from a characteristic that literary criticism shares with the other human sciences: its drive to adopt a reflexive and self-critical posture towards its own central objects and concepts. By reflecting on authorship, criticism aspires not just to describe a literary phenomenon; it also wishes to bring to light the conditions that make this phenomenon possible and thinkable. At the heart of recent studies of authorship, no matter how historical their aspiration, we find a certain quasi-philosophical dialectic or play between authorship and its material conditions, between the author as an exemplary consciousness and the unconscious determinations that bring this consciousness into being and speak through it. The thematic name for this play is the 'formation of the subject'. Our purpose is to provide a historical and theoretical argument against this conception of authorship and to outline an alternative approach.
This paper provides a historical redescription and reinterpretation of Alain Badiou’s major work,... more This paper provides a historical redescription and reinterpretation of Alain Badiou’s major work, Being and Event. The work is approached historically, as a text that uses Heideggerian metaphysics to perform an allegorical exegesis of mathematical set theory and does so as a means of fashioning a supremacist spiritual pedagogy for a philosophical elite in the context of a national intellectual subculture.
When Max Weber delivered his “Science as a Vocation” lecture in 1917 it was to an audience of stu... more When Max Weber delivered his “Science as a Vocation” lecture in 1917 it was to an audience of students facing war and political conflict, and shaped by its membership of activist youth groups whose ideologies were informed by left-Hegelianism. Resisting the clamour for a political message that would light the path to a progressive future, Weber told the students that such philosophical prophecy betrayed the office of the scholar. This consisted in transmitting the “value free” methods that characterised empirical fields, and the ethical disciplines that students had to undergo in order to master these methods. The paper argues that when the Frankfurt School rejected Weber’s approach it did so on the basis of a critique that amounted to a cultural-political attack grounded in the left-Hegelianism that he had repudiated.
Current discussions of the early Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy are dominated by two majo... more Current discussions of the early Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy are dominated by two major approaches. According to the first, this reception was governed by a universal Enlightenment rationalism that was present in Judaism no less than in Kantian philosophy. According to the second, it was the fact that Kantianism contained a latent Judaic kabbalistic philosophy that made it attractive to Jewish intellectuals. This paper departs from both approaches by showing that when Jewish intellectuals encountered Kantianism they found neither a universal rationality to which Judaism should conform, nor an esoteric Jewish metaphysics to which Kantian philosophy had already conformed, but something else entirely, namely a hostile philosophical religion that sought to reconstruct Judaism in its own image. As a result of the historical context in which this challenge arose, some Jewish intellectuals accepted this reconstruction as a rational reform, while others repudiated it as a Christi...
The present religious constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany is the product of protracte... more The present religious constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany is the product of protracted historical conflicts and political settlements that began in the sixteenth century. The mediation of these conflicts and settlements and the piecemeal establishment of the constitution was the achievement of imperial public law and diplomacy. In fact, what would become the basic form of this constitution — a state-managed multi-confessionalism — had been installed in the core state of Brandenburg-Prussia by the end of the seventeenth century, entirely under the aegis of the Hohenzollern monarchy and its judicial advisers. Given that Germany did not become a territorial state until late in the nineteenth century, and did not become an electoral democracy until the early twentieth century, the paper investigates the implications of the presence of a non-democratic religious constitution within a modern electoral democracy.
Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany, 2001
We began this book by contesting the view of early modern German intellectual history as a dialec... more We began this book by contesting the view of early modern German intellectual history as a dialectical progression leading to Kant. We have since discovered that this historiography is anything but a mistake. It is, in fact, a central weapon in the ongoing intellectual civil war between civil and metaphysical philosophy. This historiography first appeared in the dialectics through which Kant represents his own transcendence of the philosophies that preceded his. In using the figure of homo duplex to organise his intellectual antinomies, Kant was able to reduce the colliding cultural worlds seen at Halle to a series of neatly paired intellectual oppositions – between rationalism and voluntarism, idealism and empiricism – which could be resolved through the cultivation of a particular intellectual deportment. This method was then used by his early adherents – such as the theologian Carl Friedrich Stäudlin – to write Kant-centred histories of philosophy (Hochstrasser , –). Like Kant, Stäudlin was centrally preoccupied with reconciling moral philosophy and Christian theology; and he was among the first to use the metaphysical hermeneutics of Kant’s Religion to marginalise Pufendorf for ‘failing’ to achieve this goal (Stäudlin ). Never forgiven for its detranscendentalising of ethics and desacralising of politics, at the end of the eighteenth century civil philosophy was driven from Protestant arts faculties by Kant’s renewal of Schulmetaphysik, finding itself increasingly restricted to the teaching of law and politics. If, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many historians still treat the civil philosophers as failing to reconcile rationalism and voluntarism in a morally grounded politics, this is surely testimony to the long hegemony of post-Kantian philosophical history, which is perhaps only now beginning to break down. In making its own contribution to this disintegrative process, this book has offered a redescription of Kant’s practical philosophy, including its dialectics. Kant’s philosophy is best understood as a modification of a
Page 1. IDEAS IN CONTEXT The Secularisation of the Confessional State The Political Thought of Ch... more Page 1. IDEAS IN CONTEXT The Secularisation of the Confessional State The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius Ian Hunter ... THE SECULARISATION OF THE CONFESSIONAL STATE The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius IAN HUNTER University of Queensland ...
Although history is the pre-eminent part of the gallant sciences, philosophers advise against it ... more Although history is the pre-eminent part of the gallant sciences, philosophers advise against it from fear that it might completely destroy the kingdom of darkness—that is, scholastic philosophy—which previously has been wrongly held to be a necessary instrument of theology.
Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is now identified as an index of ... more Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is now identified as an index of the current state of literary history and theory. The significance of this topic stems from a characteristic that literary criticism shares with the other human sciences: its drive to adopt a reflexive and self-critical posture towards its own central objects and concepts. By reflecting on authorship, criticism aspires not just to describe a literary phenomenon; it also wishes to bring to light the conditions that make this phenomenon possible and thinkable. At the heart of recent studies of authorship, no matter how historical their aspiration, we find a certain quasi-philosophical dialectic or play between authorship and its material conditions, between the author as an exemplary consciousness and the unconscious determinations that bring this consciousness into being and speak through it. The thematic name for this play is the 'formation of the subject'. Our purpose is to provide a historical and theoretical argument against this conception of authorship and to outline an alternative approach.
This paper provides a historical redescription and reinterpretation of Alain Badiou’s major work,... more This paper provides a historical redescription and reinterpretation of Alain Badiou’s major work, Being and Event. The work is approached historically, as a text that uses Heideggerian metaphysics to perform an allegorical exegesis of mathematical set theory and does so as a means of fashioning a supremacist spiritual pedagogy for a philosophical elite in the context of a national intellectual subculture.
When Max Weber delivered his “Science as a Vocation” lecture in 1917 it was to an audience of stu... more When Max Weber delivered his “Science as a Vocation” lecture in 1917 it was to an audience of students facing war and political conflict, and shaped by its membership of activist youth groups whose ideologies were informed by left-Hegelianism. Resisting the clamour for a political message that would light the path to a progressive future, Weber told the students that such philosophical prophecy betrayed the office of the scholar. This consisted in transmitting the “value free” methods that characterised empirical fields, and the ethical disciplines that students had to undergo in order to master these methods. The paper argues that when the Frankfurt School rejected Weber’s approach it did so on the basis of a critique that amounted to a cultural-political attack grounded in the left-Hegelianism that he had repudiated.
Current discussions of the early Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy are dominated by two majo... more Current discussions of the early Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy are dominated by two major approaches. According to the first, this reception was governed by a universal Enlightenment rationalism that was present in Judaism no less than in Kantian philosophy. According to the second, it was the fact that Kantianism contained a latent Judaic kabbalistic philosophy that made it attractive to Jewish intellectuals. This paper departs from both approaches by showing that when Jewish intellectuals encountered Kantianism they found neither a universal rationality to which Judaism should conform, nor an esoteric Jewish metaphysics to which Kantian philosophy had already conformed, but something else entirely, namely a hostile philosophical religion that sought to reconstruct Judaism in its own image. As a result of the historical context in which this challenge arose, some Jewish intellectuals accepted this reconstruction as a rational reform, while others repudiated it as a Christi...
Past interpreters of Kant’s thought seldom viewed his writings on politics as having much importa... more Past interpreters of Kant’s thought seldom viewed his writings on politics as having much importance, especially in comparison with his writings on ethics, which (along with his major works, such as the Critique of Pure Reason) received the lion’s share of attention. But in recent years a new generation of scholars has revived interest in what Kant had to say about politics. From a position of engagement with today’s most pressing questions, this volume of essays offers a comprehensive introduction to Kant’s often misunderstood political thought. Covering the full range of sources of Kant’s political theory—including not only the Doctrine of Right, the Critiques, and the political essays but also Kant’s lectures and minor writings—the volume’s dis- tinguished contributors demonstrate that Kant’s philosophy offers compelling positions that continue to inspire the best thinking on politics today.
With the exhaustion of postcolonial studies, and following the historical turn in studies of Euro... more With the exhaustion of postcolonial studies, and following the historical turn in studies of European imperialism, the time is ripe for a more sharply historical consideration of the role of European legal thought in processes of colonial governance. Rather than recycling general theories of the ideological role of law in European colonization, the contributions to this volume focus on the historical interaction between law and politics in British colonial contexts in order to clarify how European legal doctrines and institutions were actually transmitted, negotiated and modified in the concrete circumstances of frontier polities.
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