Abstract This article presents an edition of the last session in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s 1968/69 Heidelberg lecture course “Hegel und Heidegger”. The edition is based on an audio recording of the event held at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. During this session, Martin Heidegger gave a brief speech on the project of phenomenology, contrasting it in particular with Hegel’s speculative dialectics. Gadamer contributed with some opening remarks on Heidegger’s philosophy, which are also edited. The edition of this never-published material is accompanied by an introduction, presenting the historical context of the event and discussing what questions were matters of disagreement between Heidegger and Gadamer in the 1960s.
Abstract The article outlines the core elements of the approach to the transnational circulation of ideas and highlights its potential for a methodology of philosophical exile research. Exile is understood not merely as a biographical event, but as an epistemic condition in which new forms of philosophical practice emerge. Based on the premise that philosophising is a social practice, this approach makes visible the trajectories of ideas across languages, public spheres, and institutions, as well as their transformative potential within specific contexts of circulation. The focus lies on the thought of Hannah Arendt, whose exile writings from the 1940s exemplify how political self-positioning, acts of translation, and transgressions of boundaries condense into a critical philosophy of the in-between. The article advocates for a methodology of exile research that is not guided by predetermined disciplinary or nation-state categories, but by the social and epistemic practices of philosophers in exile.
Abstract On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump declared that it was the policy of the United States to recognise two sexes, male and female. These sexes, he claimed, are not changeable and are grounded in an incontrovertible reality. In this lecture, I address the question: Why is it so important, in the current political climate, to insist on the binary biological definition of gender as two opposing sexes? I seek to clarify this ideology using two examples: (1) the history of the female academic body and women’s access to the university against the background of the bourgeois family; and (2) the female maternal body and the renaissance of the ideology of the happy mother-as-housewife. This reveals that the ideological rehabilitation of supposedly biological facts is part of a configuration shaped by power relations and by political, cultural, and economic interests, and that it converges with the gender ideology of far-right populism: what is at stake is the restoration and perpetuation of the traditional separation between a private female and a public male sphere, and thus the exclusion of reproduction, vulnerability, dependency, and everything corporeal from the public realm. Since, as I argue, this separation is the core of patriarchal societies, I advocate a different understanding of the public and the private, and a conception of social justice that is articulated beyond two ideological social spheres.
This article begins by outlining the so-called "concept horse paradox" that results from Frege's strict separation between concepts as functions and objects as arguments. It is argued that this paradox is indicative of a wider problem in philosophy, namely the tendency to reify the conceptual. Husserl is then presented as a philosopher who initially shows a keen eye for the danger of succumbing to this tendency but ends up giving in to it on a higher level in his theory of Wesensschau. It is shown that the reason for this lies in his conception of what an object is and how it is signified by a proper name. Cassirer, by contrast, takes Frege's idea of the functionality of propositions more seriously than Frege himself when he draws the consequence that an object, too, must be thought as a functional unity and that a proper name is merely a proto-concept.
The paper reconstructs Paul Natorp's project of a critical psychology that avoids psychologism, that is, one that does not reduce subjectivity to mere psychological facts. Natorp considered his psychology to be guided by the transcendental method of his own school, the Marburg School. The task of this psychology is to reconstruct the objectifications of science by returning to the fundamental acts of subjectivity, thereby bringing the program closer to Edmund Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. Finally, the paper discusses the further development of Natorp's work.
ADHD is one of the most common mental disorders diagnosed worldwide. There are two main diagnostic tools: the DSM-5, primarily used in English-speaking countries, and the S3 guidelines in German-speaking countries. This article critically examines these diagnostic guidelines. ADHD is primarily conceptualised as an attention deficit; however, a definition of "attention" or "inattention" is completely absent from the guidelines. The article will show that the usual diagnostic criteria fail to capture the experiences of ADHD patients, as important aspects such as will, interest, and socio-normative context are overlooked. After a phenomenological discussion of some of the crucial concepts, this article proposes that ADHD should be understood not as an attention deficit, but rather as the inability to direct attention according to will, interest and the socio-normative context.
Since Kant, theories of subjectivity seem to revolve around what David Carr, following Husserl, calls the paradox of subjectivity: that the I is both a subject for and an object in the world. This paper reexamines two attempts to address this problem, emerging at the intersection of Neo-Kantianism and phenomenology - Richard H & ouml;nigswald's 'Denkpsychologie' and Wolfgang Cramer's 'Denkontologie'. Both seek to concretise transcendental subjectivity without relinquishing its unconditional claim, by conceiving the I as both principle and fact. Yet they arrive at different results. H & ouml;nigswald's monadological account remains largely neo-Kantian in treating subjectivity as the concrete ground of the validity of judgments, whereas Cramer reinterprets the 'I think' as an expression of transcendent knowledge, advancing toward a transcendental ontology and speculative metaphysics of subjectivity. I conclude with a reassessment of Kant's critical idealism as an adequate response to the paradox of subjectivity.
This essay examines the semantics of crisis in late Husserl, seeking to contextualise this within its time and to consider both contemporary references to Husserl's diagnosis - from the end of the interwar period - and current discourse surrounding the so-called 'polycrisis'. The alarming picture of a crisis in the singular is contrasted with both the question of the inner plurality inherent in this very crisis and with today's deliberate reflections on a multiplicity of crises. The urgency of critical escalation or, conversely, permanence and thus possibly the loss of the notion of an end to the crises, as well as of a resolution: here, Husserl seems to have opted, anachronistically, for a pathos of decision-making that no longer makes any sense within the framework of discourse on the polycrisis. The contrast between the singular crisis that drives action and the many crises that run counter to one another could also be interpreted differently, i. e. in favour of a phenomenology that acknowledges the multiplicity and heterogeneity of philosophical findings on crisis, yet cannot condone passivity. In the Krisis manuscripts, the warning against 'M & uuml;digkeit' (weariness) serves as a key metaphor for this. At this point, Husserl calls not only for a change of attitude, but for action, even though it is clear that phenomenology - as a philosophy - possesses scarcely any means to this end.
The text distances itself from the widespread view that human movement is a change of location of the physical body in time. In addition, it develops the thesis that human movement is just as much a felt-bodily (leibliche), pathic experience (Widerfahrnis) in pre-dimensional space and in modal position time (modale Lagezeit). The philosophical basis for this is Hermann Schmitz's New Phenomenology, and the empirical object is sporting movements. The text shows how internal felt-bodily movements, felt-bodily experiences of dissonance and consonance, suggestions of motion (Bewegungssuggestionen) and felt-bodily experiences of presence are significant in sporting movement. However, these are not only sport-specific felt-bodily experiences, but fundamental pathic experiences of human movement. The text therefore provides insights for the philosophy of sport as well as for a general philosophy of human movement based on sport.
This essay has its point of departure in an observation: The monumental history of philosophy that J & uuml;rgen Habermas has published has as its guiding thread the relationship between religion and philosophy, faith and knowledge. It culminates in a presentation of the philosophy of Charles Peirce. But, oddly, it has nothing to say about Peirce's own understanding of religion and the relationship between religion and philosophy. The essay briefly summarises the present state of knowledge on Peirce and religion and then confronts it not so much with debates in theology or philosophy of religion, as others have done in the last decades, but with the interdisciplinary empirical study of religion. This happens in five steps (situated creativity, formation of beliefs with existential relevance, sacredness, the God concept, the ideal of universalism), The essay concludes with a short reflection on how Habermas's narrative would have had to change if the author had taken Peirce's contribution as seriously as it deserves.
