Thematic Seminars compilation
document
Content
Condorcet, ‘Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind’ [MtP, 12 pp]............5
Marx & Engels, ‘The Communist Manifesto: Bourgeois and Proletarians’ [MtP, 12 pp].......................12
I. Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ [6 pp] [TPR]......................................................................................16
M. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ [12 pp] [TPR]...........................................................................17
I. Kant, Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent; ‘On the Question: Is the Human Race
Constantly Progressing?’......................................................................................................................21
First proposition...............................................................................................................................21
Second proposition...........................................................................................................................21
Third proposition..............................................................................................................................21
Fourth proposition............................................................................................................................21
Fifth proposition...............................................................................................................................21
Sixth proposition...............................................................................................................................21
Seventh proposition.........................................................................................................................22
Eighth proposition............................................................................................................................22
Ninth proposition.............................................................................................................................22
I. Kant, A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: Is the Human Race Continually Improving'?....24
What sort of knowledge are we looking for?....................................................................................24
How can we attain such knowledge?................................................................................................24
Subdivisions within the concept of what we wish to know of the future.........................................24
The terroristic conception of human history................................................................................24
The eudemonistic conception of human history..........................................................................24
The hypothesis of abderitism in the human race as a definition of its future history...................24
The problem of progress cannot be solved directly from experience..............................................24
A prophetic history of the human race must nevertheless start from some sort of experience......25
An occurrence in our own times which proves this moral tendency of the human race..................25
The prophetic history of mankind....................................................................................................25
The difficulty of maxims directed towards the world’s progressive improvement as regards their
publicity............................................................................................................................................26
What profit will the human race derive from progressive improvement?.......................................26
What sequence can progress be expected to follow?......................................................................26
Conclusion........................................................................................................................................26
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,G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, introduction...............................................................................28
Translator’s introduction..................................................................................................................28
Note on the text and translation......................................................................................................28
The methods of history.....................................................................................................................29
Original history.............................................................................................................................29
Reflective history..........................................................................................................................29
Philosophical history.....................................................................................................................31
Reason in history..............................................................................................................................31
To begin with, there is the historical fact that the Greek, Anaxagoras, was the first to say that
nous—understanding in general, or Reason—rules the world.....................................................32
The second version of the thought that Reason rules the world is related to a further application
of it, with which we are well acquainted in the form of the religious truth that the world is not
subject to chance and to external contingencies, but that it is ruled by a Providence.................32
Freedom, the individual, and the state.............................................................................................33
The nature of spirit.......................................................................................................................33
The means of spirit.......................................................................................................................34
The state as realization of spirit....................................................................................................37
The theory that confronts us first is the direct contrary to our concept of the State as the
actualization of freedom: namely, the view that the human being is free by nature, but that in
society and in the state (of which he is necessarily a part) he must limit this natural freedom of
his.................................................................................................................................................38
There is a second theory to be mentioned, and this denies the general development of
[abstract] Right into the form of Law. The patriarchal condition (prevailing either in the entire
human race, or at least in some single branches of it) is regarded as the situation in which the
ethical and emotional element finds its fulfilment, along with the element of [abstract] Right. .39
History in its development................................................................................................................41
The geographical basis of history (excerpt)......................................................................................46
The division of history......................................................................................................................48
O. Spengler, Decline of the West, introduction....................................................................................51
Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment............61
The culture industry – Adorno, Horkheimer, Neomarxism, and ideology............................................63
J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (selectie) [TPR, 25 pp]...................68
Narratives of the legitimation of knowledge....................................................................................68
Delegitimation..................................................................................................................................70
Research and its legitimation through performativity......................................................................71
Legitimation by paralogy..................................................................................................................73
F. Fukuyama (1989). ‘The End of History?’. The National Interest (16): 3–18......................................76
Slavoj Zizek, Living in the Endtimes, ‘Introduction’, vii-xv.....................................................................80
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,Mark Juergensmeyer, ‘Global Antimodernism’, in Reflections on Multiple Modernities, eds. D.
Sachsenmaier, J. Riedel and S. Eisenstadt (Leiden: Brill, 2002).............................................................83
How globalization has led to anti-modernism..................................................................................84
the alternate modernity of anti-modernism.....................................................................................85
The global agenda of anti-modernism..............................................................................................86
The future of anti-modernism in a global world...............................................................................87
i. Non-globalization: new ethic and religious states.....................................................................87
ii. Guerrilla anti-globalism.............................................................................................................87
iii. Transnational alliances.............................................................................................................88
Modernity, identity, power, and globalization.................................................................................88
Ambrose King, ‘The Emergence of Alternative Modernity in East Asia’, in Reflections on Multiple
Modernities, eds. D. Sachsenmaier, J. Riedel and S. Eisenstadt (Leiden: Brill, 2002)............................89
Modernization as a great transformation.........................................................................................89
The modernity project and its new debate......................................................................................90
A cultural turn and global modernities.............................................................................................91
Globalization and Asia’s alternative modernity................................................................................92
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus 129(1): 1- 29................................................95
II........................................................................................................................................................95
III.......................................................................................................................................................96
IV......................................................................................................................................................97
V.......................................................................................................................................................97
VI......................................................................................................................................................97
VII.....................................................................................................................................................98
VIII....................................................................................................................................................98
IX.......................................................................................................................................................98
X........................................................................................................................................................98
XI.......................................................................................................................................................99
XII......................................................................................................................................................99
XIII...................................................................................................................................................100
XIV..................................................................................................................................................100
XV...................................................................................................................................................100
XVI..................................................................................................................................................100
XVII.................................................................................................................................................101
Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), Introduction and Chapter 1.................................................102
Introduction....................................................................................................................................102
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, Coloniality...................................................................................................................................102
The hidden agenda.....................................................................................................................102
The Advent of a Four-Headed and Two-Legged Monster...........................................................102
The Formation and Transformations of “Patrón colonial de poder”..........................................103
The argument to come...............................................................................................................107
Chapter one....................................................................................................................................107
The roads to the future...............................................................................................................107
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’, Critical Inquiry 35:197-222.........................................118
Thesis 1: Anthropogenic Explanations of Climate Change Spell the Collapse of the Age-old
Humanist Distinction between Natural History and Human History..............................................118
Thesis 2: The Idea of the Anthropocene, the New Geological Epoch When Humans Exist as a
Geological Force, Severely Qualifies Humanist Histories of Modernity/Globalization...................120
Thesis 3: The Geological Hypothesis Regarding the Anthropocene Requires Us to Put Global
Histories of Capital in Conversation with the Species History of Humans......................................121
Thesis 4: The Cross-Hatching of Species History and the History of Capital Is a Process of Probing
the Limits of....................................................................................................................................122
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