Contemporary philosophy

An overview of the philosophy of the present, the special problem to capture their subject at all - only as late Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche were received; Bernard Bolzano would be forgotten without Edmund Husserl. A further problem lies in the selection and interpretation. Philosophy of the present is, to deal with still living or recently deceased philosopher. Often, a substantial part of the work is not yet published or not yet written. There are prominent philosophers such as Hilary Putnam, the marked change in their basic position in the course of their work. The assessment of the significance of the different approaches is not yet firmly established in public. It takes place under the influence of timeliness. It should be noted that the analytic philosophy, if it methodically dominates, but is reflective of the themes and schools, a pronounced pluralism. For all presented directions that their origins lie in the philosophy of the second half of the 20th century.

  • 2.2.1 Gilles Deleuze
  • 2.2.2 Jean-François Lyotard
  • 2.2.3 Jean Baudrillard
  • 2.2.4 Giorgio Agamben

The situation in the German speaking

The philosophy of presence in Germany is marked both by the universities with approximately 300 positions for professors of philosophy, on the other hand are very well known philosophers in Germany no professors in philosophy as Rüdiger Safranski, Norbert Bolz and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. The best-known living German philosopher is without a doubt Jürgen Habermas, who gradually replaced as the representative of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the background of his writings " Knowledge and Human Interests " and " theory of communicative action " basic discussions nudged. Besides Jürgen Habermas also makes Peter Sloterdijk as a philosopher, essayist and " enfant terrible " of the German university philosophy a name.

In addition to the dominant debate on philosophy of mind in theoretical philosophy thematic area called ethics developed as environmental ethics, bioethics or ethics of technology for which there are even specific departments in ethics. Additions are more modern subjects such as cultural philosophy and philosophical anthropology and media philosophy. A growing importance is also the intercultural philosophy in which the conscious exchange with representatives of Islamic, Asian and African world is looking for.

Meanwhile, widespread initiatives such as the Philosophical Practice, which was, inter alia, by Gerd B. Achenbach, Alexander Dill, Joachim Koch and Günther Witzany justified ( in Austria, 1985), and examines the philosophical conversation with anyone, as well as free philosophers such as Wilhelm Schmid.

From the shadows of the great German philosophers of the 20th century as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Martin Heidegger, Karl R. Popper, Hans -Georg Gadamer and Theodor W. Adorno is in the current discussion yet emerged no prominent representative. At least in Germany have a good name Bernhardswald rock and Heinrich Rombach as a representative of the phenomenology, Ernst Tugendhat and Peter Bieri in analytic philosophy, Peter Janich and Jürgen Mittelstraß in the area of ​​Erlanger constructivism, Karl- Otto Apel in the discourse of philosophy or in the neo-pragmatism. Gerhard Vollmer made ​​the Evolutionary epistemology to a prominent position. Günter Abel and Hans Lenk developed an autonomous epistemological position of Interpretationismus. In addition to Habermas, Axel Honneth effort with the key concept of recognition to the development of critical theory. Herta Nagl- Docekal is a well-known representative of feminist philosophy. As a representative of idealism can be called Vittorio Hösle and for the philosophy of science Paul Hoyningen -Huene. Known representatives of rational criticism are Herbert Schnädelbach and Otfried Hoffe. Odo Marquard is considered a representative of a modern skepticism.

A certain proximity of the current philosophy for general political discussion shows the establishment of a statutory ethics committee in conjunction with stem cell research. Of the nine representatives, however, are five from the field of medical / genetic engineering and two each from the fields of theology and ethics ( Ludwig Siep and Claudia Siepmann ) so that the control function is limited ensured. In Austria there is even an ethics committee for the federal government and a Bioethics Commission at the Federal Chancellery. Another issue in this area is the - albeit brief - activity by Julian Nida- Rümelin as Minister of State for Culture.

Another currents of contemporary philosophy are the efforts to philosophy with children to look at the company's philosophy and philosophy of teaching, as in many schools philosophy, ethics, or so-called lebenskundlicher lesson is taught as a school subject. One way of introducing young people to the subject is the philosophy Olympiad, which takes place every year in different countries of the world and for the level of the federal states held a precompetitive in Germany.

The situation in France and Italy

Post-structuralism / deconstruction

A number of positions is referred to as post-structuralism, which were developed in and out of the works of Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. Post-structuralism is a mindset that has its starting point in a critique of structuralism. Post-structuralism is the term structure of classical structuralism in question, the change itself falls into the focus of post-structuralism and the (political ) question of how social structures and cultural formations that are linked to power and coercion, can be changed. As a younger representatives, who are also attributable to the post-structuralism and postmodernism can be called Slavoj Žižek, Luce Irigaray, and Jean -Luc Nancy.

Structuralism as post-structuralism was coined directly and indirectly by Heidegger, which led to significant criticisms of this theory direction. Noteworthy here is the influence of Heidegger on the French (post) StrukturalistInnen, as well as the inherent theoretical near va Derrida's ontology.

Jacques Derrida carries in his deconstructive approach criticism of the phenomenological method, which was also to deconstruct. Deconstruction is not a method, but practice. This means they must always be treated differently according to the particular subject matter and is not always applicable. Deconstruction is theoretically never completed.

In simple terms: Asking a Poststrukturalist " Why am I so and not otherwise ," says, Derrida the question " Why am I me ( a ) and not no one or several? "

In many cases, the deconstruction of an ethical component awarded (see Moebius 2003), because it opens up the relationship to others, a hitherto unthought or the excluded. The ethical concept of deconstruction goes back to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Clearly Derrida expresses this. In his text ". Force of law the mystical foundation of authority" (1991 ) he remarks: " Deconstruction is justice."

Richard Rorty also criticized the post-structuralism as playful as it negated by his negative and critical attitude to ontology and metaphysics which "reached freedom."

Especially in the USA developed in this sense a " deconstructivist " school, using a degenerate form of deconstruction as a method to identify metaphysical vocabulary within texts.

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a French philosopher who is considered the founder and main proponent of deconstruction. He was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Ferdinand de Saussure, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Georges Bataille and Sigmund Freud, as well as the meeting of Jewish, Christian and Islamic intellectual tradition / mysticism.

According to Derrida, deconstruction is not a method, ie. According to a certain procedure oriented philosophy, but a practice that always refers to specific, current issues Deconstruction takes the Alleged note and then immediately to focus on what this Alleged everything not claimed and omits the negative. It focuses, therefore, on what is not said. This should be highlighted and focused, so that the negative impression of the statement is clear.

Therefore, there is, according to Derrida neither " a " deconstruction, nor " the " deconstruction.

Practically, one can imagine deconstruction so that about terms and their origins questioned, discourses are examined for their speaker / writer and their intrinsic conditions out. This deconstruction in text / theory can be at work, but also for example in the film, in art, in fashion, music or architecture. In deconstructive frame itself a football game is known as " Text" to read.

He does not lead the reader on a meta-level of understanding, it reaches the distance to the deconstructed "Text", for example, in that it makes the implicit assumptions explicit, but also by otherwise introducing common terms as quotations. Central here is his methodical rejection of the idea of ​​a phonetic ( alphabetic ) writing in which Phonae (lute ) ( abstract linguistic units) are represented by graphemes than phonemes ( remaining tracks).

Deconstructive approach has been adapted especially for social science theories that deal with identities or identifications, such as queer theory and feminist theories ( Judith Butler) or cultural theories. Here, the stabilities and beings by means of a simplified " deconstruction " questions of identity and search for new political ways.

In recent works by Derrida to be related to the thinking of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is increasingly becoming manifest, which focuses on the relationship stood on the other. Other This is a singular other and quite different. Everyone else is completely different. From here, Derrida develops his decision theory. Each decision is a passive decision of the other in me. He also characterizes the practice of deconstruction as the facilitation of a relationship or a reception of the other. Unlike Levinas is not limited to people in Derrida the other or the other.

Deconstruction is the questioning of the supposed origins of the Foundations and the limits of mediation by signs and also of silence.

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher on the name Poststrukturalist best applies, as it has been classified as a representative of postmodernism. He turns in return for a logic of advanced capitalism, but represents by an ultimately fiktionalistische commit a cognition and thought to be a deception, falsehood, fiction, critical thinking itself by indistinguishability in question.

In " Madness and Civilization ", he focuses on the history of madness, its diagnosis and treatment. He demonstrates, inter alia, such as mental illnesses were constructed - one was not schizophrenic, because you suffered from a particular disease, but because someone made ​​the diagnosis " schizophrenia ". From 1975 he sits depth examination of the relationship between power and knowledge. He now sets itself apart from its earlier, " juridico- discursive " concept of power, after power was seen as repressive and obedience (for example, against laws ) aimed. The coined by him " strategically -productive" power idea, however, emphasizes that power relations are multiple, occur everywhere and act. They are all different types of relationships (eg economic) immanent and thus also pervade kursierendes knowledge.

Foucault coined the be pulling through its publications term " discourse ". His remarks on discourse analysis are very vague and change with time. The clearest he is in the " archeology of knowledge ", which he wrote as a practical reflection methods for its critics. In the humanities and social sciences, the discourse analysis is still not sufficiently well-established method, however, increasingly arise in the last few years work, based on Foucault.

Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) was a French philosopher, who with Reinhart Koselleck and others on the philosophers who have made it their mission to investigate basic concepts of the science of history and culture of remembrance and to work out the lack of self-reflection of historiography. Also, he was always trying to act as a mediator between the cultures and traditions of thought in the Anglo-Saxon, German and French speaking countries. Even after his retirement in 1987 ( Paris) and 1990 ( Chicago) to Ricoeur devoted more historical and philosophical studies in the linguistic- phenomenological context. The debate about "memory" and memory culture he enriched with the published in 2000 book La mémoire, l' histoire, l' oubli ( memory, history, forgetting). From a historical, epistemological and phenomenological point of view, he studied in the problem of remembering and the connection with the ( cultural ) memory.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism refers to a period, and intellectual and cultural movement that is hard to define, but mostly by their rejection - can be distinguished modernity - after completion of a different opinion. Postmodernism is a reaction to modernity. Meantime, there are different classifications, from first beginnings in the 1960s through to the early 1980s, where postmodernism in all sorts of everyday phenomena (eg, fashion, pop culture, art, postmodern architecture) began to show open.

While in modernity dominated the avant-garde perspective, is in postmodernism not the realization of the New in the center of the (artistic) interest, but a recombination or new applications of existing ideas. The world is not considered a progress goal, but viewed as pluralistic, random, chaotic and in their frail moments. Similarly, the human identity is considered unstable and many, partly influenced disparate, cultural factors. Postmodernism rejects commits particularly ideological in nature, which her ​​other hand, often accused of arbitrariness is made.

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was a French philosopher of postmodernism. His writings are beyond the easy readability, which is due to an artificial, highly complex and associative writing method.

Deleuze stands in a long tradition of European thinkers who were concerned with the critique of essentialism ( Spinoza, Nietzsche). In its place should - according to Deleuze - the All-One, the totality of everything that represents the entire physical universe and its conditions of possibility occurred. Deleuze thus also directed against Platonism, whose opinion was that the things of the world but imperfect manifestations of ideas are that are themselves perfect, eternal and unchanging. Deleuze put the out his vision of the world of the virtual. Each realization of objects in the world is a Nexus ( place of connectedness ) of virtualities that interact with each other necessarily imperfect. Since they are imperfect, they also interfere with the future realization of virtualities.

Deleuze and Guattari promote heterogeneity, multiplicity, nomad science and the body without organs. Your most important term, the rhizome is an alternative to the tree of knowledge offer, which was the central model for the hierarchical organization of Sciences since Plato. However, it was mainly used in media theory as a metaphor to describe hypertext networks.

Jean -François Lyotard

Jean -François Lyotard (1924-1998) was a French philosopher and literary theorist of postmodernism in the late 1970s. He occupied himself with the knowledge in the highly developed " post-industrial " societies and coined here also the concept of postmodernism. He situates himself in the theory of language and refers back here on Ludwig Wittgenstein and his theory of language games. For Lyotard communication is in the form of a game from certain rules that are updated depending on the situation, changed or maintained.

Lyotard distinguishes between two forms of knowledge, the scientistic knowledge - scientific knowledge of modernity with unexplained legitimacy - and the narrative knowledge: the traditional knowledge in the form of stories and narratives that legitimizes itself. Science sees Lyotard So as a new language game that is faced with the problem of their own privilege ( cf. agonistic ). For this, he suggests two possible legitimation stories: 1 a politically - state ( Emancipation and Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant; emancipatory dispositive ) and second a philosophical ( German idealism, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, speculative dispositive ). According to Lyotard fails two " grand narratives ", to legitimize itself; modernity was therefore failed, the grand narratives should be abandoned and replaced by new language games.

The considerations in Lyotard's appeal to Kant have massive political implications, it is one of the failed " frame stories " but also Marxism. It represents the pluralistic liberalism as alternative out - namely, as a system of convicted coexistence " untranslatable discourse ". Lyotard's philosophy is an attempt to enlightenment and reason to save at any cost, as before the recent intrusion of religion into politics.

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French philosopher and sociologist, who wrote as a critic and theorist of postmodernism on numerous topics, such as virtual reality, simulation, Cyberspace, hyperreality, fundamentalism, globalization, media society, a subjectivity and human rights. In addition, he created a kind of " anti - media theory."

Baudrillard's thinking is determined by the system of signs ( signifier and signified ), remove the statements more and more of the truth, which makes possible, for example, the seduction of the consumer. This creates a permanent space simulation of reality that ends in hyperreality ( the dissolution of all tangible, referential ).

Baudrillard loves to use mathematical and physical concepts such as space-time, parallel universe, etc. in a way that seems the learned mathematician or physicist simply pointless. The world of scientists collides with their fixed terms and clear definitions to the philosophy that deals with the concepts themselves and their meanings, with similarities and analogies in structures.

Giorgio Agamben

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben ( born 1942 ) received at the beginning of the 21st century in Germany attention. Building on Martin Heidegger and as editor of Walter Benjamin he takes literary to current law - political issues. Agamben approaches his subjects genealogically. Those in power since ancient times to try to get under control the individual in its habitats. As paradigms him the concentration camps, detention of asylum seekers and Guantánamo Bay apply. Such inclusions and exclusions, the company generated an ongoing states of emergency and is in its response to terrorism increasingly at risk to transfer these structures to the general living conditions. The Company is in transition from the parliamentary democracy to one characterized by the Government of the Republic.

The situation in the Anglo-American area

The American philosophy is largely determined by analytical method. Initially, this focus was in the areas of language philosophy and pragmatism. After most of the Carnap -student Willard Van Orman Quine was shown in different contexts, that an explanation of the world in the context of logical empiricism is unsustainable, analytically trained theorists turn more and more to a wider range of subjects to which includes all subject areas and positions, including metaphysical questions.

Use is made of a few to a greater extent on the classic representatives of Pragmatism (Charles S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey ). Even with Nelson Goodman, a anti-realist tendency combined with the thesis that people in their multiplicity created through language and other symbols different versions of worlds, or " ways of world production " are different. There is a certain proximity to Interpretationismus (see above). Current representative of a ( neo) pragmatism on various topics is Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom and Hilary Putnam. In particular, the herkommende of classical analytical topics Rorty with his book " The Mirror of Nature ," in which he represents a radical naturalism which triggered a fierce debate because he was the philosophy the possibility of knowledge reasoning and thus, say critics, its own foundation denies.

An important recent topic and the American philosophy is the philosophy of mind. Here is not only discussed the centuries-old controversy among other things, but by far, if the spirit is entirely materialistic or naturalistic explained and implemented. Closely connected with this subject is the question of determinism. The number of prepared positions is nearly as large as the number of themselves to be uttered philosophers. Each of the individual theorists, such as Hilary Putnam, represented over time different, mutually incompatible positions. The latest phase of this direction is represented by the work of Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, Wilfrid Sellars, Fred Dretske, David Lewis, Saul A. Kripke and especially by John Searle.

In the practical philosophy of neokantianische approach of John Rawls in the philosophy of justice drew much attention. In ethics, on the other hand have the views of the Australian Peter Singer - especially in Germany - triggered strong reactions. For him, the ethical assessment has to take into account only the preferences of all stakeholders. Terms as that of the " person" are only abkünftig justified in this context. This has about the ecology, animal husbandry, abortion or euthanasia for the current practice of the Western world very unusual consequences in the area. In addition, a variety in detail exists otherwise certain utilitarian positions in addition to various alternatives, including new editions of about contract theories as well as of deontological theories.

Another " trend " in the field of ethics is the revival of virtue ethics, especially by the British Philippa Foot and Alasdair McIntyre with a strict rejection of both utilitarianism and the ethics of duty. An oriented to reason position on the ethics of Aristotle developed Martha C. Nussbaum.

A natural law established "Ethics of Liberty" Murray Rothbard developed.

Feminist Philosophy

Judith Butler ( born 1956 ) is a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature, and is regarded today as the representative of a deconstructive feminism. One of the most important contributions of Butlers is a performative model of gender, are "male" and "female " understood as a repetition of acts in which the categories, and not as natural or inevitable absolutes. These contributions were also influential in the feminist and critical theory, because Butler so that the category " woman " as the subject of feminism questioned. This resulted especially in Germany bitter debates within feminist theory.

The subjectification of man is accomplished by Butler within social (power) structures, which is to think of each identity in the context of the social / cultural conditions. Judith Butler uses in its analysis of various theories and research approaches, including those of Sigmund Freud, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, the latter is probably to look for Butler's entire oeuvre as formative.

Julia Kristeva ( b. 1941 ) is a feminist intellectuals, psychoanalyst, writer and philosopher whose writings on linguistics and language helped shape the post-structuralist discussion. Already in the early 70s problematized Kristeva female identity in patriarchy. Because of their proximity to psychoanalysis, Kristeva but was criticized by parts of the feminist literature. Recently had their work influence on the theories of gender studies.

Luisa Muraro ( born 1940 ) is an Italian professor of philosophy, an association for Philosophers ( Diotima ) called into existence, which stands for feminism as practically lived philosophy.

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