Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, New York
Research project title:
Responsibility and Hope
Abstract
After the publication of Hans Jonas’ Das Prinzip Verantwortung forty years ago, the principle of responsibility has become a key concept in moral and political debates. Yet the unconditional responsibility for the possibility of the existence of future generations – not only of humans, but also of other living beings – is invariably accompanied by the “heuristics of fear,” which presupposes imagining the worst-case scenario and a pronouncedly bleak future. The dystopian principle of responsibility was introduced as a response to Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung, which envisions the possibility of a utopian future for humanity. The proposed project will discuss these two principles and will argue that they are not mutually exclusive, so that, while still preserving the imperative of responsibility, one can maintain a utopian ideal as a regulative idea for moral and political action.
Events
Thursday, October 17, 2019
Fellow Colloquium
“Rethinking Responsibility”
Research Project:
Critique of Bored Reason
Research Project:
This project is meant to provide a critique of some forms of modern radical philosophy by drawing its genealogy from Diogenes the Cynic to Nietzsche and contemporary thinkers like Rorty, Rancière and Agamben. It revolves around the topic of boredom as the mode of being of the contemporary monological and lonely subject who exists in isolation and thinks himself in constant repetition. Scandal, then, is an attempt to overcome the state of the exclusion of the other, which is expressed epistemologically in the idea of the modern scientific revolution, aesthetically in modernism, and politically and socially in the idea of political revolution. I intend to argue for an understanding of reason as communicative and comically scandalous, capable of providing real answers to real problems, rather than being a negative instrument of the destruction of tradition and establishing one’s autonomous self.
Events:
Lecture, December 7, 2015
Collective Memory and Collective Recollection
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften der Goethe-Universität
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Biografische Angaben
Dmitri Nikulin is Professor of Philosophy who teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York. His interests range from ancient philosophy and early modern science to the philosophy of memory and philosophy of history. -
Publikationen
Dialectic and Dialogue (2010) Comedy, Seriously (2014) The Concept of History (2017) Critique of Bored Reason (forthcoming) Edited and co-edited collections: Memory: A History (2015) Philosophy and Power in Antiquity (2016) Productive Imagination: Its History, Meaning and Significance (2018) Matter, Imagination and Geometry (Ashgate, 2002), On Dialogue (Lexington, 2006), Dialectic and Dialogue (Stanford, 2010), Comedy, Seriously (Palgrave, 2014), Memory: A History (Oxford, 2015).