Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences, Vol. XV
IWM, Vienna 2003 [Published on the Web]
Edited by: Shawn Gorman
Contributions by: Eric Brown, Dimitri Constant, Bradley Herling, Berthold Molden, Katharina Pewny, Balázs Trencsényi and Tereza Vajdová
Locations of the Political
PrintIntroduction
In the essays collected for this volume, the political occupies a position that might best be called architectonic: it is the common thread running through the different scholarly approaches of the IWM's Junior Fellows. The difficulty of establishing the limits (institutional, social, discursive) of the political is perhaps one reason why these essays –which deal with philosophy, religion, literature, art, and history (as well as political science) – all create a language to locate it. The strength of the IWM's Junior Fellows' Conference undoubtedly lies in the diversity of the specializations – and individuals – it brings together. So it should not be surprising that the political is "located" in as many different manners as there are topics under discussion.
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Frege’s Anti-Psychologism and the Problem of the Objectivity of Knowledge
I hope to answer three questions with this paper. 1. What is psychologism?, 2. What is so bad about psychologism?, and 3. Why should we care? I shall start with a preliminary answer to each of these questions. This introduction shall be followed by a discussion of Gottlob Frege’s views on psychologism, which will make up the bulk of the paper. I conclude with some thoughts on the relevance of Frege’s anti-psychologism to contemporary philosophy of language and to the ethics of discours.
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Rawls and the Duty of Civility
The ancient Greeks and many who have taken inspiration from them have understood human life as fulfilled in participation in political life, which, of course, includes public discussion, voting, and holding political office.
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Sartre: Retrospective Illusions and the Losers of History
In 1947, Sartre's Qu'est-ce que la littérature? made political engagement the essence of literary writing. Sartre's own engagement as a "compagnon de route" of Marxism began a few years later. By the end of Sartre's career as a writer, he had entirely abandoned literature in favor of philosophy and biography, but his political commitment persisted until his death in 1980. The marriage of literature and politics proved to be a difficult one.
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Posttraumatic Theatre. A Concept in Progress on the Performativity of Un/rest.
The aim of this project is the development of a representational theory of rest. Both theater and performance art are central places/spaces for the negotiation of social challenges in the face of the acceleration and limitation of personal time. As such, theater and performance art offer representations of rest and unrest, and it is through their analysis that I shall develop my theory.
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Towards the Spiritual Renewal of Europe: India in the Early Thought of the Brothers Schlegel
The grand experiment that is the European Union has obviously focused on various forms of integration, including the economic, the diplomatic, and the legal. The challenge of achieving integration on these fronts has been difficult, but much has already been accomplished. As the experiment has unfolded and expanded, however, there have increasingly been calls not just for pragmatic integration but also for forms of “identification” with Europe as a trans-national entity – and identification between the people of Europe across local, national, and regional boundaries.
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‘Der Diamant, den der Weihnachtsmann der Rechten brachte…’
Die guatemaltekische Friedensnobelpreisträgerin und Maya-Aktivistin Rigoberta Menchú habe in ihren vielfach übersetzten und millionenfach verkauften Erinnerungen nicht nur ihre eigene Lebensgeschichte verändert, sondern vor allem ein falsches, von links-revolutionären Ideen getragenes Geschichtsbild verbreitet.
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Peasants Into Bulgarians or the Other Way Round: The Discourse of National Psychology
The question of Bulgarian national character was always bound to the problem of statehood. This is mainly due to the fact that, as the prominent Bulgarian intellectual historian, Ivan Elenkov, put it, the state was perceived as "the only source of modernizatory initiative, the only means to catch up with the structures of modernity," and it also constituted the principal horizon of expectations concerning the future. Furthermore, the state-centeredness of the political culture also explains the relative compactness of the intelligentsia in the first decades of independent Bulgaria. This feature entailed that the cultural elite did not become polarized according to alternative traditions, which led to a constant oscillation between different political and meta-political positions....
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Limits of Public Debate in the EU Pre-Accession Period: Czech Republic
The current Eastern enlargement of the European Union is a complex matter and can be approached from a number of angles. The focus here will be on some of the features of public debate within the accession process in one candidate country, the Czech Republic. The paper is based on media research and above all on the analysis of Czech government documents and publications within the framework of government information strategy as well as texts published by NGOs.
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