HICO Agenda
— Upcoming events
Lecture by our honourable member Miglena Dikova-Milanova (UGent): Rewriting the Sublime: Kantian Echoes in DeLillo, Knausgaard, and Bulgakov
Thursday 8 May, 4pm
Faculty Room, Blandijn
Registration is not required: HICO welcomes all!
Including coffee break and refreshments, generously provided by HICO
The aesthetic concept of the sublime emerges across philosophical and literary contexts, assuming diverse theoretical and fictional forms. One of the most structured and influential expositions on the sublime is found in Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy and earlier essayistic writings. The presentation explores Kant’s struggle to define and articulate the language of the sublime while analysing how Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita rework, ironize, and reinterpret Kantian narratives. Additionally, it examines the distinctions and intersections between philosophical and fictional expressions of sublime experiences. Rather than a purely aesthetic category, the sublime is presented as a dynamic interaction between the inner and outer world, exposing the hidden processes of emotion and thought when individuals confront the limits of reality. The presence of the sublime in philosophical and fictional narratives is not incidental; rather, these narratives strive to reveal, comprehend, and transcend the boundless and the unknown through distinct yet interconnected strategies.
— Past events (Academic year 2024-2025)
Collab HICO/Sarton: Yearly HICO flagship event: Alex Klein (McMaster University):
Thursday 20 March, 4pm
Faculty Room, Blandijn
Nationalism and Naturalism: On Russell and James
A growing body of scholarship reconstructs and celebrates Russell’s move to something like naturalized epistemology around 1919 (e.g., Kitchener 2007, Levine 2008). The pressures that are typically cited as having pushed Russell away from foundationalism and towards a view of philosophy as continuous with science (especially with psychology) include issues in philosophy of mathematics and a “felt inadequacy of his earlier theories of judgment” (Kitchener). One outgrowth of this shift is Russell’s development of a form of neutral monist metaphysics the basics of which he derived (on his own telling) from William James.
In this talk, I will argue that Russell had already taken a naturalistic turn in his political philosophy at least as early as 1915. In his "Principles of Social Reconstruction" and in essays collected in "Justice in War-Time," Russell argued that effective resistance against nationalist bellicosity required a more psychologically adequate account of human “impulse.” "It is not by reason alone,” he wrote, "that wars can be prevented, but by a positive life of impulses and passions antagonistic to those that lead to war.” Here, too, James lurks in the background, as Russell cites “The Moral Equivalent of War” as the best available diagnosis of the problem. My discussion can be treated as a case study in the need to keep social and political settings in view when considering epistemological or even metaphysical developments in the history of philosophy.
Alexander Klein is Canada Research Chair and Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University, where he is also Director of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre. His work on James includes a forthcoming monograph entitled "Consciousness Is Motor: William James on Mind and Action" (OUP).
Including a free reception at 6pm, kindly provided by: HICO and Sarton Centre.
Online reading group: Language and Thought Before and After Kant
Our honourable members Alice Cambi and Levi Haeck are pleased to announce an online fortnightly reading group, “Language and Thought Before and After Kant”, starting on 19/02/2025. The reading group is organized by the Linguistic Kant Consortium, a newly established research initiative within the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University, Belgium. It brings together a PhD and a Postdoctoral project, both funded by the Flemish Research Council (FWO), obtained by Alice Cambi and Levi Haeck respectively, under the supervision of Professor Gertrudis Van de Vijver.
The central aim of the consortium is to explore the intersection of Kant’s transcendental philosophy and philosophy of language and/or linguistics. This area of study has seen a growing wave of interest in recent years, though there remains a scarcity of resources for scholars and students working on Kant’s philosophy. The Linguistic Kant Consortium seeks to address this gap by (a) organizing the aforementioned fortnightly reading group dedicated to Kant's reflections on language, as well as his intellectual sources (e.g., Locke, de Condillac, Rousseau), key interlocutors (e.g., Herder, Hamann), and the developments in post-Kantian philosophy (e.g., von Humboldt, Hegel). To enrich the discussions, the reading group will also (b) feature regular lectures by leading experts, who will provide valuable insights and context to the texts under review.
The first lecture will be delivered by Professor Klaas Willems, who will talk about “Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Kantian philosophy of language” (see below).
All interested students and colleagues are warmly invited to join for the discussions (a) or lectures (b). To be included in the mailing list, receive the Teams link, and the schedule of the reading group, send an email to Levi.Haeck@UGent.be.
Lecture by Klaas Willems (UGent): Wilhelm von Humboldt's Kantian Philosophy of Language
Wednesday 19 February, 4pm
Faculty Room, Blandijn
Wilhelm von Humboldt’s (1767-1835) philosophy of language integrates, transforms and extends central aspects of the transcendental (‘critical’) philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Humboldt incorporates ideas from a whole range of predecessors (Aristotle, Leibniz, Monboddo, Condillac, Herder, Fichte, among others), but his most systematic guide is Kant, in particular the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781/1787), the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) and Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798).
While there are only few comments on language in Kant’s writings, language is Humboldt’s main object of enquiry. Yet in many respects Humboldt remains faithful to Kant’s transcendental perspective, to the extent that Humboldt can be considered the preeminent – and perhaps the only true – representative of a Kantian philosophy of language. I will focus on Humboldt’s integration and transposition of key concepts in Kant’s philosophy such as Anfang and Ursprung, Synthesis of Verstand (Kategorien) and Sinnlichkeit (Anschauung), Schematismus and Einbildungskraft, Gemeinsinn, Urteil and Begriff, Organ and System. I will also pay particular attention to the terms Zeichen, Sprache and Symbol in both Kant’s and Humboldt’s writings.
In and through his philosophy of language, Humboldt provides an important complementary contribution to Kant’s central concern with knowledge, i.e. the possibility and Begründung of objective experience and Erkenntnis. One of Humboldt’s principal claims is that speakers’ subjectivity in the speech act (das jedesmalige Sprechen) is an irreducible aspect of that knowledge. To conclude, I will therefore consider the question whether, for Humboldt, language constitutes a Bedingung der Möglichkeit der Erkenntnis in Kant’s sense.
Lecture by our honourable member Louis Schreel (UGent): From Transcendental to Dynamical Structuralism: The Fate of the Transcendental in Deleuze and Petitot
Tuesday 3 December, 4pm
Room 0.5, Blandijn
Registration is not required: HICO welcomes all!
Including coffee break and refreshments, generously provided by HICO
Abstract: In his early, programmatic essay “How do we recognize structuralism?” (1967), Deleuze presents a confrontation between structuralism and transcendental philosophy with the aim of demonstrating (1) how structuralism transforms transcendental philosophy, and (2) how a new transcendental structuralism becomes compatible with contemporary ideas in topology and dynamical systems theory concerning self-organization, singularities, complexity, etc. Concerning the first point, the key innovation of structuralism is the idea that the constitution of meaning in language does not presuppose an ideal, transcendental subject. Instead, linguistic structure is conceived as a transcendental field without a subject, which is generative of both meaning and subjectivity. Deleuze’s second key idea in this essay is that the foundations of structuralism are not only transcendental but also topological, and not logical. As such, psychic structure should be conceived as a topological, spatial order defined by differential relations of emergence and divided by a system of energetic differences and singularities, which organize the structural space.
The aim of this talk is to evaluate these two key ideas underlying Deleuze’s transcendental structuralism: how does structuralism transform transcendental philosophy, and how should the foundations of structuralism be conceived topologically? To address the second question, I will turn to Jean Petitot’s dynamical structuralism, which has meticulously developed Deleuze’s proposal of a topological foundation. The key issue then becomes the naturalization of transcendental, constituent structure: either one conceives the foundations of structuralism and transcendental philosophy in a purely logicist manner, thereby adopting a resolutely dualist stance and leaving the naturalization of structure wanting, or one conceives these foundations in a dynamical and topological manner, thereby naturalizing constituent structure in physical, morphological and ultimately symbolic terms.
Lecture by Stephen Mulhall (University of Oxford): Scepticism in philosophy, the arts, and religion: Wittgenstein, Cavell, Nietzsche
Tuesday 1 October, 4pm
Faculteitszaal
Registration is not required: HICO welcomes all!
Including coffee break and refreshments, generously provided by HICO
Abstract: In this lecture, taking my basic orientation from Stanley Cavell's readings of Wittgenstein, I will argue that Western European modernity exhibits a distinctively melodramatic dimension, one that displays itself in philosophy, the arts (including opera, film, painting and literature) and religion, and that indicates a heightened sceptical anxiety about making ourselves intelligible to others, and to ourselves. Against this background, Nietzsche's work appears simultaneously as symptom, diagnosis and critique.