Philosophy of the present

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An overview of the philosophy of the present has the particular problem of grasping its subject at all - how late were Arthur Schopenhauer or Friedrich Nietzsche , for example ; Bernard Bolzano would have been forgotten without Edmund Husserl . Another problem lies in the selection and interpretation . Philosophy of the present is, with still living or recently deceased philosopher deal. Often a substantial part of the work has not yet been published or has not yet been written. There are prominent philosophers like Hilary Putnam , who changed his basic position significantly in the course of his work. The public's assessment of the importance of the various approaches has not yet been established. It takes place under the impression of the topicality . It should be noted that although analytical philosophy dominates methodologically, there is a pronounced pluralism in the subjects and schools . It is true of all directions presented that their beginnings lie in the philosophy of the second half of the 20th century ; see. 20th Century Philosophy .

The situation in the German-speaking area

The philosophy of the present in Germany is on the one hand shaped by the universities with approx. 300 positions for philosophy professors, on the other hand very well-known philosophers in the German-speaking area are not qualified professors in philosophy like Peter Sloterdijk , Richard David Precht , Rüdiger Safranski , Norbert Bolz and Robert Pfaller . The best-known living German philosopher is without a doubt Jürgen Habermas , who, as a representative of the Frankfurt School , gradually broke away from the background of critical theory and initiated fundamental discussions with his writings “ Knowledge and Interest ” and “ Theory of Communicative Action ”.

In addition to the dominant debate on the philosophy of mind in theoretical philosophy, subject-specific so-called area ethics have developed in ethics, such as environmental ethics , bioethics or technology ethics , for which there are even specific chairs. There are also more modern subjects such as cultural philosophy and philosophical anthropology or media philosophy . The intercultural philosophy , in which the exchange with representatives of the Islamic , Asian and African world is consciously sought, is also gaining in importance .

Initiatives such as Philosophical Practice , founded by Gerd B. Achenbach , Alexander Dill , Joachim Koch and Günther Witzany (in Austria 1985) and seeking a philosophical conversation with everyone, as well as free philosophers such as Wilhelm Schmid , are now widespread .

From the shadow of the great German-speaking philosophers of the 19th century such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , as well as the 20th century such as Ludwig Wittgenstein , Rudolf Carnap , Martin Heidegger , Karl R. Popper , Hans-Georg Gadamer and Theodor W. Adorno is in the no prominent representative has emerged in the current discussion.

At least in Germany, Bernhard Waldenfels and Heinrich Rombach have a good name as representatives of phenomenology , Ernst Tugendhat and Peter Bieri in analytical philosophy, Peter Janich and Jürgen Mittelstraß in the field of Erlangen constructivism , Karl-Otto Apel in discourse philosophy and neopragmatism and Hans Albert as a representative of critical rationalism . Gerhard Vollmer made evolutionary epistemology a prominent position. Günter Abel and Hans Lenk developed an independent epistemological position of interpretationism . In addition to Habermas, Axel Honneth tries to further develop critical theory with the key concept of recognition . Herta Nagl-Docekal is a well-known representative of feminist philosophy. As a representative of idealism can Vittorio Hösle call and for the philosophy of science Paul Hoyningen-Huene . In a revised connection with Kant, Werner Flach , Hans D. Klein, Kurt W. Zeidler attempted a transcendental philosophy that was critically renewed from a post-Neo- Kantian perspective , while Harald Holz also made use of factual motives for a transcendental idealism understood in neo-Platonic terms ( Fichte , Hegel , Schelling ) , Peter Rohs and Lorenz Puntel with the incorporation of motifs from analytical philosophy. Paul Hoyningen-Huene and Martin Carrier are well-known names in the field of scientific theory . Well-known representatives of rational criticism are Herbert Schnädelbach and Otfried Höffe . Odo Marquard is considered a representative of modern skepticism .

The establishment of legally established ethics councils or ethics commissions , for example in connection with research on stem cells, shows a certain proximity of current philosophy to general political discussion . In the special medical case (stem cells), however, five of the nine representatives of the ethics committee are from the field of medicine / genetic engineering and two each from the fields of theology and ethics ( Ludwig Siep and Claudia Siepmann ), so that the control function is only guaranteed to a limited extent. In Austria there is even an ethics committee for the federal government and a bioethics committee in the Federal Chancellery . Another topic in this area is the - albeit brief - activity of Julian Nida-Rümelin as Minister of State for Culture .

Other currents of contemporary philosophy are the efforts to develop philosophy with children , corporate philosophy and philosophy didactics, as philosophy, ethics or so-called life science lessons are taught as a school subject in many schools . One way of introducing young people to the topic is the Philosophy Olympiad , which takes place annually in various countries around the world and for which a preliminary competition takes place at the level of the federal states in Germany.

The situation in France and Italy

Post-structuralism / deconstruction

A number of positions that were developed in and from the works of Jacques Lacan , Roland Barthes , Julia Kristeva , Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault are referred to as post-structuralist . Post-structuralism is a school of thought that has its starting point in a critique of structuralism . Poststructuralism questions the structural concept of classical structuralism, change itself comes into the focus of poststructuralism and the (political) question of how social structures and cultural formations that are linked to power and coercion can be changed. Slavoj Žižek , Luce Irigaray , and Jean-Luc Nancy can be named as younger representatives, who can also be assigned to post-structuralism or post-modernism .

Structuralism and post-structuralism were both directly and indirectly influenced by Heidegger , which led to major criticisms of this theory. The influence of Heidegger on the French (post) structuralists, as well as the inherent theoretical proximity of v. a. Derridas on ontology .

In his deconstructive approach, Jacques Derrida criticizes the phenomenological method, which must also be deconstructed. Deconstruction is not a method, but a practice . This means that it always has to proceed differently according to the respective subject and is not always applicable in the same way. In theory, deconstruction is never complete.

Put simply: If a post-structuralist asks "Why am I like this and not different?", Derrida asks the question "Why am I (one) and not nobody or several?"

In many cases, deconstruction is also assigned an ethical component (cf. Moebius 2003), since it opens up the relationship to the other, to something that has not been thought of or excluded so far. The ethical concept of deconstruction goes back to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas . Derrida is very clear about this. In his text the force of law. He expresses the mystical reason for authority (1991): "Deconstruction is justice".

Richard Rorty , too, criticizes post-structuralism as being playful, because his negative and critical attitude towards ontology and metaphysics negates their “achieved freedom”.

In this sense, a “deconstructivist” school developed in the USA in particular, which uses a form of decay of deconstruction as a method to identify metaphysical vocabulary within texts.

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a French philosopher who is considered the founder and main proponent of deconstruction . He was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche , Ferdinand de Saussure , Martin Heidegger , Edmund Husserl , Georges Bataille and Sigmund Freud as well as by the clash of Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions of thought / mysticism.

According to Derrida, deconstruction is not a method, that is, a philosophy shaped according to a certain procedure, but a practice that always relates to certain current issues. Deconstruction takes note of the assertion and then immediately concentrates on what this assertion does not assert, omits and denies. It therefore focuses on what has not been said. This should be emphasized and concentrated so that the negative imprint of the statement becomes clear.

Therefore, according to Derrida, there is neither “a” deconstruction, nor “the” deconstruction.

In practice, one can imagine deconstruction in such a way that, for example, terms and their history of origin are questioned, discourses are examined for their speakers / writers and their intrinsic conditions. Deconstruction in text / theory can be at work, but also, for example, in film, art , fashion, music or architecture . In the deconstructive framework, even a soccer game can be read as “text”.

He does not lead the reader to a meta-level of understanding, he achieves the distance to the deconstructed "text" for example by making the implicit assumptions explicit, but also by introducing otherwise common terms as quotations. Central here is his methodological rejection of the idea of ​​a phonetic ( alphabetical ) script in which phonemes (sounds) are represented by graphemes (permanent traces) as phonemes (abstract language units).

The deconstructive approach was particularly adapted for social science theories that deal with identities or identifications, such as queer theory or feminist theories ( Judith Butler ) or cultural theories. Here, by means of a simplified “deconstruction”, the stability and essence of identities are questioned and new political paths are sought.

In the last works of Derrida his reference to the thinking of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas becomes more and more apparent, whose focus was the relationship to the other. This other is a singular other and completely different. Everyone else is very different. It is from here that Derrida also develops his decision theory . Every decision is a passive decision of the other in me. Likewise, he characterizes the practice of deconstruction as enabling a relationship or a reception of the other. In contrast to Levinas, with Derrida the other or the other is not limited to people.

Deconstruction is the questioning of the supposed origins, the foundations and the limits of mediation by means of signs and also of silence.

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French philosopher to whom the term post-structuralist most closely applies, and he has also been classified as a representative of postmodernism . Although he opposes the logic of advanced capitalism , he calls critical thinking itself into question through indistinguishability through an ultimately fictionalistic fixation of knowledge and thinking as deception , lie , fiction .

In Madness and Society , he deals with the history of madness, its diagnosis and treatment . Among other things, he demonstrates how mental illnesses were constructed - one was not schizophrenic because one suffered from a certain illness, but because someone diagnosedschizophrenia ”. From 1975 onwards he delved into the relationship between power and knowledge . He now distinguishes himself from his earlier, “juridical-discursive” concept of power, according to which power was understood as repressive and aimed at obedience (for example to laws). The “strategic-productive” idea of ​​power he coined, on the other hand, emphasizes that power relationships are multiple, arise and work everywhere. They are inherent in all other types of relationships (for example economic ones) and thus permeate circulating knowledge.

Foucault coined the term “ discourse ” that was used in his publications . His statements on discourse analysis remain very vague or change over time. It becomes most evident in the “ Archeology of Knowledge ”, which he wrote down practically for his critics as a reflection of methods. Discourse analysis is still not a sufficiently established method in the humanities and social sciences , but there are increasing numbers of works based on Foucault.

Paul Ricœur

Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) was a French philosopher who, along with Reinhart Koselleck and others, was one of the philosophers who set themselves the task of examining basic concepts of the science of history and the culture of remembrance and working out the lack of self-reflection in historiography . He also always tried to act as a mediator between the cultures and traditions of thought in the Anglo-Saxon, German and French-speaking areas. Even after his retirement in 1987 (Paris) and 1990 (Chicago), Ricœur continued to devote himself to historical-philosophical investigations in the linguistic and phenomenological context. He enriched the debate on “ memory ” and the culture of memory with the book La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli (memory, history, forgetting), published in 2000. From a historical, epistemological and phenomenological point of view, he examines the problem of remembering and the connection with (cultural) memory.

Postmodern

The postmodernism refers to an era and intellectual and cultural movement that is hard to define, but mostly by its rejection - of - after completion disagree Modern can be distinguished. Postmodernism is a response to modernity. There are different chronological arrangements, from the first beginnings in the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s, when postmodernism began to show itself openly in all sorts of everyday phenomena (for example fashion, pop culture , art, postmodern architecture).

While the avant-garde perspective dominates in the modern era , in the post- modern era it is not the realization of the new that is the focus of (artistic) interest, but a recombination or new application of existing ideas. The world is not viewed with a goal of progress , but viewed as pluralistic, random, chaotic and in its fragile moments. Human identity is also seen as unstable and shaped by many, sometimes disparate, cultural factors. Postmodernism turns against fixations, especially ideological ones, which is why it is often accused of being arbitrary.

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was a French postmodern philosopher. His fonts defy easy readability, which is due to an artificial, highly complex and associative writing process.

Deleuze stands in the long tradition of European thinkers who dealt with the critique of essentialism ( Spinoza , Nietzsche). In its place should - according to Deleuze - come the all-one, the totality of all, which represents the entire physical universe and its conditions of possibility. Deleuze was also directed against Platonism , whose view was that the things of the world are only imperfect manifestations of ideas that are themselves perfect, eternal and immutable. Deleuze countered this with his idea of ​​the world of the virtual . Every realization of objects in the world is a nexus (place of interconnectedness) of virtualities, which necessarily interact with one another imperfectly. Since they are imperfect, they also disrupt the future realization of virtualities.

Deleuze and Guattari propagate heterogeneity, diversity , nomadic science and the body without organs. Its most important term, the rhizome , is intended to offer an alternative to the tree of knowledge , which has been the central model for the hierarchical organization of the sciences since Plato. He was, however, especially in the media theory as a metaphor to describe hypertext - networks used.

Jean-François Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was a French philosopher and postmodern literary theorist in the late 1970s. He dealt with the knowledge in the highly developed “post-industrial” societies and also coined the term postmodernism. He locates himself in language theory and refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein and his theory of language games . For Lyotard, communication takes the form of a game with certain rules that are set, changed or followed depending on the situation.

Lyotard distinguishes between two forms of knowledge, scientific knowledge - the scientific knowledge of the modern age with unexplained legitimation - and narrative knowledge: traditional knowledge in the form of stories and narratives that legitimizes itself. Lyotard sees science as a new language game that is confronted with the problem of one's own justification (cf. agonistics ). For this he suggests two possible legitimation narratives: 1. a political-state ( emancipation and enlightenment , Immanuel Kant ; emancipatory dispositive ) and 2. a philosophical ( German idealism , Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ; speculative dispositive). According to Lyotard, both "great narratives" fail to legitimize themselves; Modernity has therefore failed, the great narratives have to be given up and replaced by new language games.

Lyotard's considerations in recourse to Kant have massive political implications , since he also counts Marxism as one of the failed " framework narratives " . He highlights pluralistic liberalism as having no alternative - namely as a system of "untranslatable discourses" condemned to coexistence . Lyotard's philosophy is the attempt to save enlightenment and reason at any cost, for example from the renewed invasion of religion into the political .

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was a French philosopher and sociologist who, as a critic and theoretician of postmodernism, wrote on numerous topics such as virtuality, simulation , cyberspace , hyperreality, fundamentalism , globalization , media society, subjecting and human rights . He also designed a kind of "anti-media theory".

Baudrillard's thinking is determined by the sign system ( signified and signified), in which statements are increasingly distant from the truth , which, for example, makes it possible to seduce the consumer . This creates a space of permanent simulation of reality , which ends in hyperreality (the dissolution of everything tangible, referential).

Baudrillard loves to use mathematical-physical terms such as space-time , parallel universe , etc. in a way that the trained mathematician or physicist simply seems pointless. The world of natural scientists with its fixed terms and clear definitions collides with that of philosophy, which deals with the terms themselves and their meanings, with similarities and analogies in structures.

Giorgio Agamben

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (* 1942) also received attention in Germany at the beginning of the 21st century. Following up on Martin Heidegger and as editor of Walter Benjamin , he takes a literary position on current legal and political issues. Agamben approaches his subjects genealogically . The powerful since ancient times have tried to get the individual under control in his living space. The concentration camps , the imprisonment of asylum seekers and Guantánamo Bay are considered paradigms for him . Through such inclusions and exclusions, society is constantly creating states of emergency and, in its reaction to terrorism, is increasingly in danger of transferring these structures to general living conditions. Society is in transition from parliamentary democracy to a government-dominated republic.

The situation in the Anglo-American area

American philosophy is largely shaped by the analytical method. Initially the focus was on the philosophy of language and pragmatism . After the Carnap student Willard Van Orman Quine in particular had shown in various contexts that an explanation of the world within the framework of logical empiricism is unsustainable, analytically trained theorists are increasingly turning to a broader range of topics that includes all subject areas and positions, inclusive metaphysical questions.

Some of them resort to the classical representatives of pragmatism ( Charles S. Peirce , William James and John Dewey ) to a greater extent . Nelson Goodman already combined an anti-realistic tendency with the thesis that human beings in their multiplicity create different versions of worlds through language and other symbols , that is, different “ways of world creation” exist. Here there is a certain proximity to interpretationism (see above). Current representatives of (neo-) pragmatism in various subject areas are Richard Rorty , Robert Brandom and Hilary Putnam . In particular, Rorty, who comes from classical analytical subject areas , triggered a heated discussion with his book “ Der Spiegel der Natur ”, in which he advocates radical naturalism , because he gave philosophy the possibility of justifying knowledge and thus, as critics believe, its own basis denies.

An important new topic of American philosophy is the philosophy of mind . Among other things, but by no means exclusively, the centuries-old controversy is discussed here as to whether the spirit can be explained and realized completely materialistically or naturalistically. The question of determinism is closely related to this topic . The number of positions elaborated is almost as large as the number of philosophers who comment on them. Individual theorists, such as Hilary Putnam, have taken different, incompatible positions over time. The most recent phase in this direction is represented by the work of Donald Davidson , Michael Dummett , Wilfrid Sellars , Fred Dretske , David Lewis , Saul A. Kripke and, above all, John Searle .

In practical philosophy, John Rawls' neo-Kantian approach to the philosophy of justice drew a great deal of attention. In terms of ethics, on the other hand, the views of the Australian Peter Singer - especially in Germany - triggered violent reactions. For him, the ethical decision-making process has to take into account the preferences of all those affected. In this context, terms such as "person" can only be justified in the future. In the areas of ecology, animal husbandry , abortion or euthanasia, this has very unusual consequences for today's practice in the western world. In addition, there is a large number of utilitarian positions that are determined differently in detail, as well as various alternatives, including new editions of contract theories as well as deontological theories.

Another “ trend ” in the field of ethics is the revival of virtue ethics , especially by the British Philippa Foot and Alasdair McIntyre with a strict rejection of both utilitarianism and duty ethics . Martha C. Nussbaum developed a reason-oriented position on the ethics of Aristotle .

A natural law established "ethics of freedom" developed Murray Rothbard .

Feminist Philosophy

Judith Butler (* 1956) is a professor of rhetoric and comparative literary studies and is now regarded as the representative of deconstructive feminism . One of Butler's most important contributions is a performative model of gender in which the categories "masculine" and "feminine" are understood as repetitions of actions rather than natural or inevitable absolutes. These contributions were also influential in feminist and critical theory-building because In doing so Butler challenged the category of "woman" as the subject of feminism. This led to bitter debates within feminist theory, especially in Germany.

According to Butler, human becoming a subject takes place within social (power) structures, whereby every identity is to be thought of in connection with social / cultural relationships. In her analysis, Judith Butler makes use of a wide variety of theories and research approaches , including those of Sigmund Freud , Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault , the latter of which can be seen as formative for Butler's entire work.

Julia Kristeva (* 1941) is a feminist intellectual , psychoanalyst , writer and philosopher whose writings on linguistics and language helped shape the post-structuralist discussion. As early as the early 1970s, Kristeva was problematizing female identity in patriarchy . Because of her proximity to psychoanalysis , Kristeva was criticized by parts of feminist literary studies. More recently, her work has influenced the theories of gender studies .

Luisa Muraro (* 1940) is an Italian professor of philosophy who founded an association for women philosophers ( Diotima ), which stands for feminism as a practically lived philosophy.

Neuthomism and Neo-Scholasticism

The neo-Thomism as the hard core of the neo-scholasticism is a broad flow of Christian philosophy in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Pope Leo XIII. With his encyclical Aeterni patris of 1879, he appointed the medieval church philosopher Thomas Aquinas to be the first doctor of the church and recommended his teaching for every Catholic priestly training. As a result, interest in medieval scholasticism grew and a number of neo-Homist philosophies emerged. Outstanding representatives of this movement were Joseph Maréchal , Jacques Maritain , Étienne Gilson , Johannes B. Lotz and Erich Przywara .

literature

  • Topoi (magazine) 25 (2006) (well-known contemporary philosophers determine misery, prospects of hope and research programs from their respective perspective)
  • Reiner Ruffing: Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy. Fink, Paderborn 2014 (2nd complete edition, 1st edition 2005), ISBN 978-3-8252-4065-3
  • Andreas Graeser: Positions of Contemporary Philosophy. From pragmatism to postmodernism. Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-47595-7
  • Julian Nida-Rümelin (Ed.): Philosophy of the Present in Individual Representations. From Adorno to v. Wright (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 423). 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-520-42302-2 .
  • Ingeborg Breuer, Peter Leusch, Dieter Mersch: worlds in your head. Profiles of contemporary philosophy. License issue WBG, Darmstadt 1996, ISBN 3-534-13420-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. RealFictionFilme: "Derrida - A Film by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman"