Houston Colloquium in German Philosophy

Co-Organized with Andrew Werner (UH), Fall 2023– | Fall 2023 Program | Spring 2024 Program

The Houston Colloquium in German Philosophy features 2-3 talks each semester, which focus on Kant and Post-Kantian German Philosophy. This semester’s program can be found here.

Economic Pluralism: Past and Present

Co-Organized with Johannes Steizinger (McMaster) and Helen McCabe (Nottingham), and funded by a connection grant from the SSHRC, Conference, September 2022 | Webpage

Abstract. Faced with growing global material inequality and economic instability, it is urgent to re-examine the fundaments of our economic order. The project ‘Economic Pluralism: Past and Present’ takes on this contemporary task from a historical perspective. Examining widely neglected economic proposals from the long 19th century (by e.g. J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, J.S. Mill and H. Cohen), we turn to philosophers who are usually not read as economists – but whose economic proposals hold surprisingly important insights for the current discussion. Indeed, defying contemporary categorizations as either ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’, their proposals exhibit a pluralistic character often unseen in the contemporary discussion, but ripe for rediscovery – a rediscovery that our workshop aims to undertake.

Our project, hence, (1) brings together cutting-edge scholarship on historical figures and their often neglected economic visions; (2) initiates an international dialogue to critically evaluate the feasibility and desirability of their pluralistic approaches for the contemporary economic world with a special focus on issues such as social inequality and the ethical limits of the market; (3) engages with an audience, both inside and outside the academy, through digital outreach and graduate student involvement.

In addressing these aims, the workshop will wrestle with fundamental questions at the intersection of ethics and economics, with a particular focus on issues surrounding markets, socialist values, and the intersection between the two. Do markets constitutively destroy values such as solidarity or community (and what is the meaning of those values)? Do rationally acceptable principles of distributive justice rule out (or, by contrast, indeed require) a market economy? Is individual freedom compatible with an economic order that is in whole or in part governed by an economic plan? Can market norms be compartmentalized into specific social spheres?

These questions will be at the center of a two-day workshop, as well as of a special issue that will be composed of contributions to this event.

Hegel’s Legacy: First Nature in Social Philosophy

Co-Organized with my colleagues Connie Wang and Gal Katz, funded by a grant from the Thyssen Foundation, Conference/Anthology, April 2022

Abstract. While recent years have seen an enhanced interest in Hegel's conception of "second nature", we believe that there are reasons to go beyond the widespread fascination with this Aristotelian concept. A key idea that we wish to explore in the conference is that the goodness or rationality of second nature—including its remaining “alive”, as it were—depends on the extent to which it retains sufficient grounding in first nature: in our biological desires and drives. Indeed, it seems that on Hegel’s view, modern Sittlichkeit owes its supreme rationality, goodness and freedom to the fact that it incorporates and gives outlet to human properties that are rooted in first nature. Any habituated second nature that suppresses such first nature properties risks ethical corruption and ossification (as was the fate of ancient Sittlichkeit, on Hegel’s diagnosis).

Our conference, hence, aims at a reevaluation of the role that first nature plays in Hegel’s social theory. Since such a reevaluation always should go beyond the confines of historically-focused Hegel scholarship, we explicitly also want to probe his views for their contemporary significance: indeed, his commitment to first nature as a norm—for evaluating, critiquing and designing social institutions—seems highly pertinent to social theory today. A wide range of present day ethical problems with a “material substrate” can, or so it appears, be understood in terms of failing the norm of sufficient grounding in first nature—e.g., the proliferation of depression and anxiety in developed societies, the decline in sexual intimacy in the United States, even the environmental crisis.