New venue: Päätalo A34, behind/above the dining hall.

This seminar is open for interested PhD students in any discipline, as well as master’s students. (and will be ok for the social philosophy FILA9 as well). The seminar will meet weekly, and read Axel Honneth’s articles, e.g. from the collection The I in We. (Articles by the classics that he comments on, and by his critics, will form the background and further reading.) The first meeting will be on 22nd January, when we will discuss the practicalities.

Axel Honneth is the director of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and a professor at Columbia University. His work focuses on social-political and moral philosophy, especially relations of power, recognition, and respect. One of his core arguments is for the priority of intersubjective relationships of recognition in understanding social relations. This includes non- and mis-recognition as a basis of social and interpersonal conflict. For instance, grievances regarding the
distribution of goods in society are ultimately struggles for recognition.

Axel Honneth will visit Finland (Helsinki) at 23rd May 2014.
For more info, contact arto.laitinen@uta.fi

1-    Introduction: Why and how Marx and Heidegger?

Subject: The question about the relation between theory and practice, philosophy and transformation/revolution, Precedents, a short overview.

Readings (not obligatory)

Address: Heidegger on Marx, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxmzGT1w_kk

Martin Heidegger. Letter on Humanism, transl. Frank A. Capuzzi. https://ia600703.us.archive.org/30/items/HeideggerLetterOnhumanism1949/Heidegger-LetterOnhumanism1949.pdf

Martin Heidegger, “The Age of World Picture,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, New York; Harper and Row, 1977:115-54.

Karl Marx. Thesis on Feuerbach, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

______ The German Ideology, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/abstract.htm

Herbert Marcuse. “On Concrete Philosophy” in Heideggerian Marxism, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

2 – Alienation and reification of Being

Subject: Marx’s and Heidegger’s theory of alienation, with some footnotes by Luckas.  And Marcuse.

Readings:

Karl Marx. Karl Marx. “Estranged Labour” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. And ed. Martin Milligan (Mnieola, New York. Dover Publications, 2007), p. 67-83. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time, § 25-27 and 35-38

György Luckas. “The phenomenon of reification”, in History and Class Consciousness, Merlin Press, 1967,  https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm

Optional: Lucien Goldmann. Lukacs and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy. Trans. William Q. Boelhower. London: Routledge, 2009.

Optional: Gérard Granel. Réinscriptions contemporaneis du Marxisme (derive, abandon, reprise). http://www.gerardgranel.com/txt_pdf/3-cours_marxisme_74_1-prepu.pdf

 3 -  Capital,  technology and the abandon of Being

Subject: The philosophical question(s) from which “we” need to confront (auseinandersetzen) “today” Heidegger and Marx. The philosophical question about the “we”, the “today”, and the “we today” or “today we”. The specter of neither of Marx nor of Heidegger, but of being.

Karl Marx. The Capital, Chapter I, section 4, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto  (Penguin Books, 2002)

On Comodities, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S1

Martin Heidegger. “The question of technology” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, New York; Harper and Row, 1977.

Jacques Derrida. “Apparition of the inapparent” in Specters of Marx. The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international, (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 125- 176

Optional: Jean-Luc Nancy. L'Equivalence des catastrophes : (Après Fukushima) (Paris: Galilée, 2012)

Optional: Michael Eldred. Capital and Technology, Marx and Heidegger, http://www.arte-fact.org/capiteen.html#0.

Subaltern 3( 2009), svensk tidskrift

To Susanna Lindberg susanna.e.lindberg[at]uta.fi

Reading the texts of the abovementioned reading list is not obligatory but it makes the understanding of the course much easier and deeper.

Each day, the first session is a lecture course and the second one (in the seminar room of philosophy) is a discussion of the day's themes)

Further information is provided by Susanna.E.Lindberg@uta.fi

 New venue: Päätalo A34, behind/above the dining hall.

This seminar is open for interested PhD students in any discipline, as well as master’s students. (and will be ok for the social philosophy FILA9 as well). The seminar will meet weekly, and read Axel Honneth’s articles, e.g. from the collection The I in We. (Articles by the classics that he comments on, and by his critics, will form the background and further reading.) The first meeting will be on 22nd January, when we will discuss the practicalities.

Axel Honneth is the director of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and a professor at Columbia University. His work focuses on social-political and moral philosophy, especially relations of power, recognition, and respect. One of his core arguments is for the priority of intersubjective relationships of recognition in understanding social relations. This includes non- and mis-recognition as a basis of social and interpersonal conflict. For instance, grievances regarding the
distribution of goods in society are ultimately struggles for recognition.

Axel Honneth will visit Finland (Helsinki) at 23rd May 2014.
For more info, contact arto.laitinen@uta.fi

Epistemology seeks to describe the structure of true propositions and arguments and to define criteria that allow us to distinguish knowledge from what is not knowledge. While epistemological categorization thus provides a useful tool for scientific, philosophical and political discourse and seems to be indispensible for rational thinking, it always at the same time threatens to limit and restrict the creative advance of our philosophical
understanding. Following and building upon Cornel West’s reading of classical American philosophy, the series of lectures offers a perspective on representative authors of Transcendentalism, Pragmatism and Neopragmatism
as ways of ‘doing philosophy’ that challenge the idea of the need for an epistemological foundation of rational thought. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William James, Alfred North Whitehead and Richard Rorty offer attempts at structuring experiential reality without settling or fixing it, thereby opening up the path for the modern tradition of process philosophy. The course consists of five successive lectures, each comprising 60 minutes of presentation and 30 minutes of discussion.