Vorlesungsverzeichnis
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Lehrveranstaltungen
„Denken ohne Geländer“ – Hannah Arendts politische Theorie (Seminar)
Dozent/in: Kristin Theresa Drechsler
Termin:
wöchentlich | Mittwoch | 10:15 - 11:45 | 12.10.2020 - 29.01.2021 | Online-Veranstaltung
Inhalt: „Ich stehe nirgendwo. Ich schwimme wirklich nicht im Strom des gegenwärtigen oder irgendeines anderen politischen Denkens ... es hat sich vielmehr einfach so ergeben, dass ich nirgendwo so richtig hineinpasse.“ (Hannah Arendt, Ich will verstehen, S. 109.) Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975) wies für sich die Bezeichnung Philosophin zurück. Denn Philosophie sei ihrem Wesen nach nicht am Politischen interessiert und von einer Geringschätzung der menschlichen Angelegenheiten gekennzeichnet. Jenen menschlichen Angelegenheiten wiederum widmete sich Arendt und kreiste hierbei vor allem um die Frage nach den Besonderheiten des Politischen. Diese Frage wird bei ihr nicht nur in Auseinandersetzung mit der theoretischen Tradition beantwortet, sondern vor allem auch in Bezug auf aktuelle Debatten und Phänomene. Und doch wäre es verkürzt, wollte man aus dieser Selbstdefinition vorschnell schließen, dass wir es hier 'tatsächlich' nicht mit Philosophie zu tun haben. Schließlich beruht die Abgrenzung von der akademischen Philosophie ja gerade auf einer tiefen Auseinandersetzung mit eben jener Tradition. Es ist also gewissermaßen ein philosophisches Denken mit der Philosophie über diese hinaus. Mehr noch, vermag gerade der Versuch sich von den traditionellen Weisen des Philosophierens zu lösen, das Verständnis darüber, was Philosophie ausmacht, zu schärfen. Im Seminar werden wir uns zum einen mit den zwei Hauptwerken „Vita Activa“ und „Über die Revolution“ befassen sowie in kleineren Essays einigen Grundbegriffen und zentralen Gedanken dieser einflussreichen Denkerin nachgehen. Darüber hinaus werden philosophische Bezugspunkte (Platon, Aristoteles, Kant, Heidegger) in den Blick genommen und Hannah Arendts politische Theorie für aktuelle Debatten fruchtbar gemacht.
Theories of Justice (Seminar)
Dozent/in: Ben Trott
Termin:
wöchentlich | Mittwoch | 12:15 - 13:45 | 14.10.2020 - 27.01.2021 | Online-Veranstaltung
Inhalt: Theories of justice constitute a particularly rich field of study, one that connects questions of ethics and moral philosophy with those of social philosophy, political philosophy and the philosophy of law. Theories of justice have often been concerned with ‘righteousness’ and with ‘fair’ or ‘equitable’ ways of going about things. In terms of etymology, ‘justice is the prescribed manner of doing things, which should be enforced by authority’ (Bunnin and Yu: 2009). As such, questions of justice can refer to the legitimacy of a social order, or the means through which it is (or should be) maintained. But the insistence that individuals, groups, or other societies be treated ‘justly’ has also often placed constraints on those very authorities invested with legitimate power within a given order. Moreover, theories of justice can provide a framework for thinking the ways in which ‘civil disobedience’ or a ‘right to resist’ may be justified. Conceptions of justice can inform notions of both ‘freedom’ (including economic freedom) and ‘equality’, while debates within moral and political philosophy have also long addressed the relationship between ‘distributive’ and other forms of justice. These debates have also interrogated: the ways in which forms of (in)justice *within* a given territory, such as the nation, might shape (in)just relations *between* territories; how historic injustices might shape (in)justice in the present; and the notion(s) of ‘the human’, and of human society, that underpin various conceptions of justice. Students will critically engage with works by: John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Thomas W. Pogge, Susan Moller Okin, Kartina Forrester, Immanuel Kant, Norman Geras, Lisa Lowe, Nancy Fraser, Wendy Brown, Rainer Forst, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Angela Y. Davis. The full syllabus is available under the 'Material' tab on myStudy. __SEMINAR OVERVIEW & EXTENDED INTRODUCTION__ This seminar provides an introduction, first, to some canonical contributions to modern theories of justice as well as, second, to some of the key debates that have animated them. It also offers a critical engagement with contemporary theories of justice, including as these relate to questions of (re-)distribution and recognition, political liberty and colonialism domination, the global order, tolerance, and the legal and political administration of justice. The seminar begins by exploring one of the most widely read contributions to moral philosophy, namely, John Stuart Mill’s 'Utilitarianism' (1861). Often described as a crucial contribution to ‘consequentialist’ theories of ethics, this work is seen as having both softened and rendered more complex (and specifically: less a-historic) the utilitarian thought of James Mill and of Jeremy Bentham whose moral theory was shaped by the doctrine that happiness, or the greatest happiness for the greatest number, both is and should be the goal of all action (and thus the criteria on which it is judged). Despite important differences with Bentham (who coined the term ‘utilitarianism’), J. S. Mill’s theory of justice – and of state power, individual rights, and liberty – remained decisively utilitarian, rejecting for instance the notion, associated with the work of social contract theorists like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of abstract or natural rights independent of their utility. John Rawls’ 'A Theory of Justice', published in 1971, was both an attempt to renew this tradition of contract theory and one rooted in a critique of the utilitarianism of Bentham and J. S. Mill (as well as of Henry Sidgwick). It came to be one of the most influential contribution to theories of justice in the twentieth century. The seminar explores Rawls’ work as well as influential critiques by Robert Nozick (whose libertarian 'Anarchy, State and Utopia' critiqued the theory of distributive justice which marked Rawls’ ‘liberal egalitarianism’ and yet shared Rawls’ opposition to utilitarianism) and by Susan Okin (author of 'Justice, Gender and the Family' and a key figure within feminist political philosophy). Drawing in part on Immanuel Kant’s ethical and political writings, Rawls developed a notion of ‘justice as fairness’, in which the ‘basic structure of society’ would be governed by ‘principles of justice’, establishing a society’s ‘fundamental terms of association’, and to which ‘free and rational persons’ with no knowledge of their skills or status would agree in a hypothetical ‘original position’ (similar to the ‘state of nature’ in social contract theory). Through Katrina Forrester’s new work 'In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy', we will look at the role of Rawls’ work in the development of international and global theories of justice – and at some competing theories – amidst debates around the emergence of a New International Economic Order in the 1970s. We will also read what some, such as Francis Fukuyama, writing in his seminal 1992 'The End of History and the Last Man', describe as ‘the intellectual basis for contemporary liberal internationalism’, namely, ‘Kant’s writings on international relations’, the most influential of which is no doubt his essay, 'Toward Perpetual Peace'. Fukuyama and other liberal international theorists have drawn on this 1795 work to argue that peace becomes possible among federations of ‘free states’ (i.e. those with republican constitutions) – because self-governing populations are seen as less likely to accept the costs of war than ‘despotisms’ are – as long as this federation itself comes to share ‘common liberal principles of right’. ‘International law’, Fukuyama writes, ‘is merely domestic law writ large.’ We will then return to the question of distributive justice, this time through Norman Geras’ work on the controversial debates that have surrounded Karl Marx’s theory of justice. In particular, Geras addresses Marx’s famous polemic against socialist notions of ‘fair distribution’ in his 'Critique of the Gotha Programme'; in other words, his rallying against efforts to address the distribution of income (or of ‘the means of consumption’) independently of ‘the mode of production’. Geras challenges the argument that this constitutes a wholesale rejection of theories of justice by Marx. He notes that while Marx does indeed often deride and show impatience for the language of justice, values and norms, his work is nevertheless characterized by ethical commitments, including to the values of ‘freedom’ and ‘self-realization’ as well as a normative investment in ideas of ‘community’ and ‘human well-being’. Remaining with the question of distributive justice, the seminar also explores Nancy Fraser’s ‘two-dimensional’ theory of gender justice. This was partly formulated in response to a shift that she identified within feminist theorizing: away from analyses of ‘gender relations on the terrain of political economy’ (which had dominated various second-wave feminisms of the New Left in the 1960s and 70s) and towards ‘culture- and identity-based conceptions’ of gender over the 1980s and 90s. Fraser’s theory of gender justice thus attempted to address the concerns of both social feminists and of ‘those rooted in the cultural turn’, providing a theory that engages ‘maldistribution and misrecognition simultaneously’. We will also engage with Lisa Lowe’s critical interrogation of the question of just ‘liberal government’ – primarily as this appears in the moral and political philosophy of J. S. Mill but also in aspects of Bentham and J. Mill’s works and in the writings of colonial administrators in the mid-nineteenth century. Lowe argues: ‘Liberal government, accompanied by free trade, became the normative political rubric under which a colonial division of humanity was extrapolated across four continents, at once the medium for political liberty in Europe and North America, and the vehicle for new forms of imperial sovereignty exercised through “rule of law,” “order and progress,” and “keeping the peace” in the colonial world.’ After the Christmas break, we turn to the question of ‘tolerance’ that has preoccupied many philosophical engagements with justice in recent decades (including those around Rawls’ appeal for “tolerating the intolerant” in his 'A Theory of Justice'). We will look in particular at the debate between Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst regarding the relationship between tolerance, liberal governance, power, state violence, socio-historical conflicts, domination, as well as social hierarchies and inequalities. Students will also have an opportunity to attend a screening of Astra Taylor’s 2018 documentary 'What Is Democracy?: A Philosophical Journey Exploring Government'. The seminar concludes by turning towards debates in the United States and well beyond, and that have received increasing attention throughout the first half of 2020, primarily as a result of the critiques of the criminal justice system advanced by the Black Lives Matter movement and by ‘abolitionist’ activists and intellectuals. We will thus explore arguments for prison and police abolition set out by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, and Mariame Kaba.