Marie Louise Krogh

In five short notes, this essay explores the semantic links and possible theoretical connotations of the term Weltgeschehen as Benjamin uses it in "Fate and Character." World events are ambiguous things: they happened before us and shaped our very own happening, they are happening to us or around us while our acts and decisions shape them in turn. By cleaving and analyzing "world" and "event," the essay shows how Benjamin employs the term Weltgeschehen critically, to denounce any static separation of the inner domains of existence and the outer domains of worldly happening.

This article concerns the question of race in late Enlightenment German philosophy and makes the case for why we in that context should reconsider the writings of Alexander von Humboldt in the philosophical canon. Contrary to many other authors who wrote on both natural history and politics in the late Enlightenment, Humboldt produced both a scientific and a political critique of then-contemporaneous natural historical conceptions of race. I give an account of these by analysing his reflections on the concepts of race and species in the first volume of the popular scientific work Cosmos (1845). I also show how Humboldt combined a critique of the pseudo-scientific concepts of race that sustain biological racialism with a diagnostic of the juridical and political reality of racial divides that came to be instituted by the colonial systems of governance and slave-labour in plantation economies. This latter aspect is found in the demographic discussions in his so-called political essays on the Kingdom of New Spain and Cuba (1808–10, 1825–26). The dual perspective onto race theory on the one hand and practices of racialisation on the other makes Humboldt a particularly interesting case to consider in a moment where critical histories of philosophy are re-examining both effects of racialisation and conceptions of race in the history of philosophy. I argue that attending to authors like Humboldt offers one fruitful way to counter two distinct problems that arise from what I call the ‘Kantian frame’ within discussions of Enlightenment race theory and racism: on the one hand that of an overly individualist conception of racism and on the other that of the absence within Kant’s own corpus of expressed links between the theory of race and the practices of racial domination.

This chapter addresses major tendencies in the history of academic French historiographies of philosophy, from the establishment of history of philosophy as a university discipline in the early nineteenth century to feminist critiques of the philosophical canon in the twentieth century. Focusing on the ways in which the philosophical character of the history of philosophy has been conceptualised, it argues that the history of the historiography of philosophy in France is marked in two ways by the intellectual legacy of Victor Cousin. At the level of canon-formation, this history has involved continuity and reproduction of those authors and texts which Cousin regarded as central to the history of philosophy. At the level of theoretical accounts of the relation between the practice and the past of philosophy, this history has involved discontinuity and the contestation of the spiritualist eclectic framework within which Cousin himself accounted for this relation. With feminist historiographies of philosophy, the theory-constitutive function of the canon itself comes into question, thus opening a new field of inquiry as to what should be counted as properly ‘philosophical’.