Attay Kremer

Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift takes on the problem of the freedom of the will within pantheism, aiming to conceptualize both the notion of a system of philosophy, and that of freedom, in such a way that they are commensurate with each other as well as with human life. He seeks a “living notion” of the system of freedom. This paper explores Schelling’s understanding of the notions of freedom and systematicity, contextualizing the system of freedom with his oeuvre. Building on Hogrebe’s interpretation of the Weltalter, the notions of system and freedom are explicated by reading the logical aspects of Schelling’s ontology, specifically his understanding of the copula. To complement the literature that understands the text as an ontology of evil (e.g., Stern and Brown), this paper analyses the notion of system of freedom, in the context of which that ontology is formulated. The notion of evil, it will be argued, is an expression of freedom as part of a living system of philosophy.

Recent research in the historical sciences, dubbed ‘deep history’, seeks to undermine the division between human culture and nature, and to present humanity’s evolution as part of natural history. That goal brings in some conceptual difficulties regarding the relation of nature to history, which in the German philosophical tradition tend to be conceptualized as opposites. This paper looks to sketch the conceptual frame of deep history, relying on Kant and Hegel’s understanding of war. Kant’s thinking about human history – especially the notion and guarantee of a perpetual peace – is predicated on the purposiveness of nature, as developed in the third Critique. And so, there is a sense in which war is a particularly important manifestation of the natural in the human. Turning to Hegel, we argue that his criticism of the idea of a natural history in the Philosophy of Nature, may be overcome if we take war into consideration as a structuring notion of history. It is argued that death and conflict provide common conceptual ground in the formation of a natural history of the human bring.

The 19th century saw a dramatic transformation in the basic categories of knowledge, both in metaphysics and in physics the notions of time and matter became intertwined, following the industrial revolution. In a crucial sense, both dialectical materialism and entropic physics reflect the changes induced by the industrial revolution. In this paper, I will examine the notion of entropy so as to form a dialectical concept of it. In doing so, I will relate dialectical materialism and entropy to demonstrate their shared ground. The goal of this will be to show what the consequences of the industrial revolution have been on the form of time itself. Rather than the formal time, linear time of Newtonian mechanics and Kant’s transcendental idealism, time today has become an unorientable surface, relating back to itself in important ways. Taking some topological ideas from Deleuze’s treatment of the third synthesis of time in Difference and Repetition (1969), as well as Žižek’s concept of dialectical materialism from Sex and the Failed Absolute (2019), I will show how these disparate notions of material time bear on the topology of time after the industrial revolution.

Žižek’s new book — Panic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World — has been too easily dismissed. As readers, we are bombarded with reasons, from critiques to ridicule, to avoid it, or simply not to take it seriously. In this review, I argue that the Panic! contains a philosophical revolution that is directed at our extreme contemporary condition. The speculative judgement that Žižek suggests — “Spirit is a Virus” — embodies a call for the acceptance of the virality of humanity, and for the solidarity that comes with it. In this review, I explicate this judgement from the book and detail how it leads to “a new form of communism”, and a revolutionary new reading of Hegel.