Date: 06/15/17 - 06/16/17
Place: ZfL, Schützenstr. 18, 10117 Berlin, 3rd floor., seminar room 303
Welcome to the workshop “Hylomorphism in Kant and Idealism”.
The workshop is taking place within the context of a three-year German-Israel Foundation (GIF)
project entitled “Life and Mind: An Exploration of the Metamorphoses of
the Kantian Moment in Philosophy”. The following is a short description
of the main aims of the research project:
Our aim is to engage a fundamental configuration in philosophy that we
call the Kantian moment. We do not plan to vindicate a strictly Kantian
approach to philosophy, but rather to explore an interconnected space
opened up or initiated in Kant’s philosophy. Our first guiding
assumption is that this configuration constitutes a moment of
incomparable richness and force in philosophy. Our second assumption is
that the approach and mode of investigation of this subject matter
should be systematic rather than merely historical. Our third assumption
is that insofar as the Kantian moment is to be understood in its
systematic articulation it can inform and transforms contemporary
philosophy. In other words it is a configuration of philosophy that is
far from being exhausted and left behind by later developments.
The richness and complexity of the Kantian moment requires us to focus
our project on a guiding theme through which the broad range of issues
can be refracted. This theme is the relation of life and mind. The
choice of this focus means that the Kantian problematic is approached by
a concentration on the perspective opened most explicitly by the
Critique of the Power of Judgment. We take this work not only to present
Kant’s views on aesthetics or on the character of organic life, but
also to afford a broader sustained reflection on the living mindfulness
and on the interconnections of human subjects in a field of purposive
experience of the world.
Assessing the possibility of a critical idealism in contemporary
philosophy is of the utmost importance in addressing the rise of the
role of science in the attempts to understand thinking life. It opens
the option of a naturalism that is not necessarily simply identified
with the results of science, but which would provide a measure to assess
the place of empirical investigation in the understanding of human
mindedness within a more comprehensive view of nature. Our investigation
of the legacy of the Third Critique has further implications for the
approach to the problems of culture, history and society and would
constitute an original engagement with, and contribution to,
contemporary analytic attempts to reconceive the domain of both the
theoretical and the practical in ways that are more open to Aristotelian
and Hegelian insights.
The primary organizers are Professor Johannes Haag of Potsdam University
and Professor Eli Friedlander of Tel Aviv University. The primary
funding is from a GIF grant, supported by additional assistance from the
University of Chicago and the FAGI of the University of Leipzig.
The workshop will assume prior reading of the papers. After a very short
presentation most of the session time will be devoted to the discussion
of the pre-circulated papers.