Leonard Weiss

Philosophy is a discipline which, perhaps more than any other, is preoccupied with its history. At the same time, this preoccupation has as much to do with maintaining and reclaiming traditions as with critiquing and transforming them. Some figures leave indelible marks on schools of thought, even while attributing credit to their forebears on whose shoulders they in turn innovate and critique. The legacy of these figures is instantiated through the generative role they play in inspiring new schools of thought. Such reception is by no means inherently positive. In fact, it is often disagreement rather than affirmation that sustains the lasting impact of an original thinker.

In his later period, Schelling argued that being remains opaque to conceptual analysis in important ways and that a purely intellectual engagement with being is therefore insufficient. This issue is central to Schelling’s overall project, as his demand for a “positive” philosophy – one that exceeds the merely rational – depends on an effective self-limitation of a priori metaphysics. According to a widely held interpretation, Schelling’s appeal to a pre-conceptual dimension of being is based on Leibniz’s question regarding the cause of anything at all. In contrast, I propose that it is Aristotle who provides Schelling with the decisive argument for pre-conceptual being, and that the problem at stake is not the existence of anything at all, but rather the individuality of particular beings. I develop this claim through an analysis of Schelling’s argument in light of Aristotle’s theory of substance in Metaphysics VII and conclude by assessing its validity and scope.

The resurrection of metaphysics after Kant is usually associated with German Idealists such as Schelling and Hegel. However, this familiar picture neglects the contribution of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841). Fichte’s student and Kant’s successor at Königsberg, Herbart developed an original strand of post-Kantian philosophy that rehabilitates metaphysics, while, at the same time, incorporating key insights of Kant. In particular, Herbart transforms Kant’s notion of being as ‘absolute position’ into a conceptual tool for grounding ontological claims. This paper reconstructs Herbart’s controversial thesis that only simple entities exist. While versions of this idea have been proposed from the Pre-Socratics to Leibniz, Herbart offers an original justification: it is the notion of being itself that shows why reality must consist of simple entities.

In diesem Kapitel wird der Begriff „Objekt (klein) a“ bzw. „objet petit a“ besprochen: zunächst hinsichtlich seiner ursprünglichen Verwendung bei Jacques Lacan und anschließend mit Blick auf seine Bedeutung in zentralen Schriften Žižeks. Während das Objekt klein a bei Lacan die psychologische Bedeutung von Gegenstand und Ursache menschlichen Begehrens hat, gewinnt es bei Žižek eine explizit politische Funktion. Insbesondere stellt Žižek einen Zusammenhang zwischen der Struktur des Begehrens und der Entstehung bzw. Aufrechterhaltung kollektiver Überzeugungen her. Wie gezeigt wird, avanciert Lacans psychologischer Begriff damit zu einem zentralen Element der Žižek’schen Ideologietheorie.

Žižeks Essay Enjoyment within the Limits of Reason Alone dient als Vorwort zur zweiten Auflage von For They Know Not What They Do. Trotz der unscheinbaren Stellung als Vorwort hat der Essay programmatische Bedeutung für Žižeks Werk, indem er wesentliche Elemente von dessen Ontologie und politischer Theorie pointiert zur Darstellung bringt. Dabei thematisiert die vorliegende Zusammenfassung insbesondere die Entwicklung von Žižeks Theorie des Realen. Denn anders als in früheren Schriften soll das Reale nicht mehr nur als Gegensatz zum Symbolischen, sondern vielmehr als konstitutives Element unseres Zugangs zu einer sinnvoll erschlossenen Wirklichkeit gedeutet werden. Aus dieser Wende in Žižeks Ansatz ergeben sich bedeutende Konsequenzen für seine Interpretation politischer Systeme, nicht zuletzt für seine Deutung der Demokratie sowie für seine These der Persistenz der Ideologie in westlich-liberalen Gesellschaften.

This paper addresses the role of disagreement in relation to the goals of metaphysical inquiry. In particular, I will discuss two reactions to Kant’s initial observation that metaphysics does not make any lasting progress: Kant’s own demand for a critical revision of metaphysics and Schelling’s ideas as presented in his 1821 lecture On the Nature of Philosophy as a Science. Kant’s account allows for an appreciation of metaphysical conflict as a necessary precondition for a critically revised system of pure reason. However, he thinks that such a system will ultimately replace all previous ones and thereby make further development of metaphysics obsolete. Although Schelling appropriates Kant’s notion of systematicity, he arrives at a positive evaluation of metaphysical disagreement as an expression of freedom which articulates itself within the history of metaphysics. I argue that Schelling’s view also entails that the history of metaphysics is an ongoing process rather than terminating in an ultimate system or a withdrawal from metaphysical inquiry. Thus, we get to see a) that Kant himself (not just his post-Kantian successors) entertains an account of the essential historicity of reason and b) how Schelling both preserves and transforms the Kantian legacy of a philosophical history of metaphysics.

This paper compares the views of Hegel and Schelling regarding the problem of individuation, i.e. the question of what makes an individual (a) numerically distinct from others and (b) the very individual it is. My focus is on how Hegel approaches this problem in his metaphysics and how that relates to Schelling’s views as articulated in his ‘negative philosophy’. While Hegelians like Robert Stern and Karen Ng are optimistic that Hegel can solve the problem of individuation, I argue that Schelling puts forward an objection that both challenges Hegel’s account and provides a rationale for taking seriously Schelling’s own insistence on a pre-logical dimension of being.