The concept of the transcendental
forms the basis of Kant’s critical project. Kant’s effort to reform philosophy by delimiting the field of speculative metaphysics
from the transcendental made possible both the critique of theorical cognition and ethics. Even if this project did not succeed
in providing a critical foundation of a post-metaphysical worldview, the conceptual potential of the notion of the transcendental
has not been exhausted. For the transcendental is by no means opposed to speculative metaphysics; rather, it is itself a speculative
concept that promises to put an end to all speculation. This is how post-Kantian philosophy and literary theory received the
concept. They grasped the transcendental as the condition of possibility of both speculative and perceptible or intuitive
knowledge. The transcendental was the means by which concept and object, immediacy and reflection, the finite and the infinite
or universal could be related to one another or even intertwined.
If we grant the thesis that
at its core the concept of the transcendental includes a speculative moment, the concept’s afterlives as they are inscribed
in contemporary philosophy from Heidegger to Adorno, Foucault, and Deleuze raises two primary, correlated questions. On the
one hand, one has to clarify how the conceptual problem of drawing boundaries can be related to the semantic, dynamic-transcending
dimension of the concept, and on the other hand, how the transcendental can be understood as an interface between a “groundwork”
and its constructions from which the major categories of the modern symbolic, such as science, politics, or art, first emerge.
It is thus a question of the status of the "transcendental idea" of science, art and politics and their respective relation
to their empirical objects, to the field of their shared condition, and to the dynamics of their development as particular
symbolic forms of modernity.
Accordingly, the conference will be divided into three sections dedicated to the epistemic,
the artistic-aesthetic, and the political transcendental. The common ground lies in the significance of their respective relations
to a "transcendental idea" and the resulting theoretical and practical consequences.
With: Antonia Birnbaum, Nathan
Brown, Helmut Draxler, Peter Osborne, Rado Riha, Marc Rölli, Jelica Sumic Riha, Stella Sandford, Zeynep Türel, Jan Völker
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