Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” and the Impossibility of Direct Communication

The text analyzes the possibilities to think of pure language as indicated in the harmonization of modes of intention in the translation activity. This language is, in a sense, a regulative idea and it have to be liberated in translation. It is essential to distinguish between the modes of intention and intended objects, between what is named in pure language and what is „overnamed“ in human languages. One of the theses in this text – that language in its auto-relation undergoes auto-modalization – makes the connection with Kierkegaard's understanding of the impossibility of direct communication. The indication of the untranslatable is an opportunity in the language of the translator to insert as indicated the elusive in the translation and thus to introduce the use of a broken language. Awakening of the “echo of the original” means a “thinking more” (according to Kant) through the figure.

A Wandering Hyphen, The Reader and the Work

This is a reply to commentary by Matt Cohen, Ian Cornelius, and Alan Galey occasioned by the publication of Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and to a review of the book by John K. Young. A theory of the work based on the negative dialectic of document and text grounds the work as a regulative idea rather than an ideal entity and finds the role of the reader to be constitutive of it. The relationship (envisaged in the book as a slider) of archival and editorial digital projects, the potential cross-fertilization of philology and textual criticism, and an expanded role for textual studies inspired by D. F. McKenzie’s writings are discussed.

Zugehörigkeit als Menschenrecht

Based on her own experience of long years of statelessness, Arendt demands that the right of the individual to belong to a political community be recognized as the only human right. However, while the »right to have rights« can serve as a regulative idea, belonging that respects an individual’s personhood can neither be decreed nor granted but must have constitutive meaning for the individual. In the article, belonging therefore is described as different ways of a human’s being-in-the-world or simply as different ways of experience.

Phronesis and Religious Belief

This chapter outlines a theory of rationality integral to virtue theory suggested by a remark by Hilary Putnam that reason is both immanent and transcendent. It is immanent in that it is not to be found outside human language games, cultures, and institutions, but it is also a regulative idea that is used to criticize the conduct of all activities and institutions. The chapter proposes three corollaries of the immanence and transcendence of reason and some constraints that should be respected in defining a rational belief. These proposals are intended to help settle disputes about the rationality or epistemic praiseworthiness of culture-specific beliefs, including beliefs distinctive of a particular religion. The discussion in the chapter is at odds with the approach of Plantinga on the defense of the epistemic status of Christian belief.

The Dialectical Illusion in Kant’s Only Possible Argument for the Existence of God

The nature of Kant’s criticism of his pre-Critical ‘possibility proof’ for the existence of God, implicit in the account of the Transcendental Ideal in the Critique of Pure Reason, is still under dispute. Two issues are at stake: the error in the proof and diagnosis of the reason for committing it. I offer a new way to connect these issues. In contrast with accounts that locate the motivation for the error in reason’s interest in an unconditioned causal ground of all contingent existence, I argue that it lies in reason’s interest in another kind of unconditioned ground, collective unity. Unlike the conception of the former, that of the latter directly explains the problematic ontological assumption of the possibility proof, the existence of intelligible objects as the ground of possibility. I argue that such Platonic entities are assumed because they are amenable to the kind of unity prescribed by reason. However, since the interest in collective unity has a legitimate regulative use when applied to the systematic unity of nature, the conception of God entailed by the possibility proof is retained as a regulative idea of reason.

Universality, spectrality, proximity: The cinematic faces of Europe's other

For a number of scholars, the crisis of European identity is a result of the asymmetry between Europe's universal normative claims and its particular ethnic, cultural and racial contexts. This asymmetry is epitomized by the EU's failure to ratify its legally binding constitution. For others, the same asymmetry constitutes the very condition of being a European. Those envision Europeanness beyond its regulative idea as the ethical injunction of a promise to 'the other'. This article probes the validity of each of these arguments by juxtaposing two groups of films. Gianfraco Rosi's Fire at Sea (2016) and Ai Weiwei's Human Flow (2017) remain committed to the idea of human rights as a universal norm, an idea whose most prominent advocate is Jürgen Habermas. As an alternative to this view, Guido Hendrikx's Stranger in Paradise (2016) and Christian Petzold's Transit (2018) are taken to demonstrate what Jacques Derrida describes as 'hospitality' and 'spectrality'. Based on this analysis, the paper finds both models inadequate to hold together the irreconcilable modalities of the political and the ethical. To address this deficiency, it revisits Levinas' account of 'justice beyond the face' to propose an extension of the ethical view of Europeanness into the spheres of international law and public institutions.

Epochenwandel im Völkerrecht?

This article asks whether public international law is facing an epochal change. The first section spots various current trends in international law that suggest a decreasing significance of international law and institutions in today’s international relations. In order to assess whether these observations amount to an overall trend, the second section traces perceptions of instability and change in public international law scholarship of the past, presents a short history of international law since 1945 and discusses the problems of a periodization of the history of international law. The third section adopts a normative perspective to capture tendencies of change in the policy fields of security, economy and governance. The final section discusses responses to these developments in international legal theory, offers a brief practical political philosophy of contemporary international law, or recommendations for foreign policy. It suggests not to abandon the belief in the „co-operation thesis“ but to adhere to constructive multilateralism as a regulative idea.

The Parity and Disparity between Inner and Outer Experience in Kant

This article advocates a new interpretation ofinner experience– the experience that one has of one’s empirical-psychological features ‘from within’ – in Kant. It argues that for Kant inner experience is the empirical cognition of mental states, but not that of a persistent mental substance. The schema of persistence is thereby substituted with the regulative idea of the soul. This view is shown to be superior to two opposed interpretations: the parity view that regards inner experience as empirical cognition of a mental object on a par with outer experience and the disparity view that denies altogether that inner experience is empirical cognition.