Through the encounters between neo-Kantianism and the life sciences in the nineteenth century, this book explores Nietzsche's naturalism and his understanding of normativity. Proposing specific historical reasons for Nietzsche adopting the views that he did, Emden argues that Nietzsche asked questions about naturalism and normativity that are still relevant today.
This book explores Friedrich Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought. Surveying Nietzsche's entire intellectual career from his years as a student in Bonn and Leipzig during the 1860s to his genealogical project of the 1880s, Christian Emden contributes to a historically informed discussion of Nietzsche's response to the political predicaments of modernity, and sheds new light on the intellectual and political culture in Germany as the ideals of the Enlightenment gave way to the demands of the modern nation state. This is a distinguished addition to the series of Ideas in Context, and a major reassessment of a philosopher and aphorist whose stature among post-enlightenment European thinkers is now almost unrivalled.
Initially propounded by the philosopher Jurgen Habermas in 1962 in order to describe the realm of social discourse between the state on one hand, and the private sphere of the market and the family on the other, the concept of a bourgeois public sphere quickly became a central point of reference in the humanities and social sciences
The relationship between different media has emerged as one of the most important areas of research in contemporary cultural and literary studies. But how should we conceive of the relationship between texts and images today? Should we speak of collaboration, interaction or competition? What is the role of literary, historical and scientific texts in a culture dominated by the visual? What is the status of images as cultural artefacts? Are images forms of representation, do they simulate reality or do they intervene in the material world? And how do literature and cultural theory – themselves essentially textual discourses – react to the much-discussed visual turn within Western culture? Does the concept of ‘intermediality’ allow literary, historical and cultural scholars to envisage a more general theory of media? Addressing these questions from a programmatic point of view, the articles in this volume investigate the effects of different forms of representation in modern European and American literature, media and thought.
Walter Benjamin – zwischen kri-tischer Theorie und historischer Kulturwissenschaft Walter Benjamin nimmt in der Tradition kultur- und sozial-wissen-schaftlichen Denkens eine eigentümliche Position ein. Dies hat nicht zuletzt damit zu tun, dass seine Arbeiten in die Endphase der sogenannten “Achsenzeit” der Kulturwissenschaften im Anschluss an die Krise des Historismus von ca. 1880 bis 1930 fallen. Im Spannungsfeld zwischen kritischer Theorie und Historismus spiegeln sie die philosophischen und politischen Problemlagen kultur-wissenschaftlichen Denkens um 1930.