Modern time-consciousness: philosophy and politics of history - Leo Strauss on history and truth in the relation of theory and praxis. KU Leuven
The first part of the project will clarify a set of problems centering on the ...
How to divide things fairly? Philosophers have been pondering this question under the heading of ‘distributive justice’ at least since Aristotle. It has recently been argued that the meaning of this term changed dramatically in the last 200 years.Today, distributive justice deals primarily with the fair division of benefits and burdens arising from social cooperation. It gives citizens a right to material goods based on need or effort. Yet ...
There seems to be a gap between the commonsensical appreciation of sovereignty and its institutional reality. A sovereign people is supposed to have full legal and political power over itself, yet this collective sovereignty is most often institutionalized in the form of a constitutional and representative democracy. This means that legal and political power are constrained by binding constitutional rights and rules and that decisions are ...
This project aims to systematize the contemporary, increasingly influential movement named ‘Transcendental Materialism’ (‘TM’) by philosopher Adrian Johnston. Associated with, among others, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, this philosophy eclectically draws from German idealist, psychoanalytical, and Marxist traditions. Recent scholarship shows that TM, despite earlier attempts at systematization, is currently still unable to reflect on its key ...
Before the introduction of philosophy in China, the two figures Mozi and Yang Zhu were treated as the stereotypical heretics in the Chinese tradition: Mozi (5th c. BCE) was the extreme altruist without respect for family priorities; Yang Zhu (4th c. BCE) was the extreme egoist without any sense of political responsibility. Since their rehabilitation as “Chinese philosophers” in the 20th century, they have been portrayed with newly coined ...
On the basis of his concept of the political, Carl Schmitt has criticized the liberal ideal of a neutral state for failing to account for the political distinction between friends and enemies – a logic that any political entity is subject to. His criticism consists of two elements: on the one hand the idea of a neutral state is insufficiently political because of its unwillingness to decide on an authoritative and constitutive political ...