Lektürekurse Wintersemester 2026/27

Simon Voge: Die Dialektik der Aufklärung

Kursbeschreibung: „Die Dialektik der Aufklärung“ von Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno ist eines der absoluten Schlüsselwerke der Kritischen Theorie. Es gehört nicht nur zu den wichtigsten Texten des 20. Jahrhunderts, sondern besticht bis heute durch eine enorme Aktualität. So ist der darin geprägte Begriff der „Kulturindustrie“ wohl noch immer am zutreffendsten, wenn es um die Beschreibung einer durch Algorithmen gesteuerten Populärkultur
geht. Im weiteren Verlauf ihrer radikalen Kulturkritik behandeln die Autoren das Verhältnis von Mythos und Aufklärung und die damit einhergehende Naturbeherrschung.

All das verhandeln die Autoren im Anschluss an Marx, Hegel oder Kant. Das deutet auch schon an, wie voraussetzungsvoll dieser Text ist. In dem Lektürekurs soll es genau darum gehen, sich diesem voraussetzungsvollen und anspruchsvollen Text zu nähern, sich einen Zugang zu erarbeiten, so gemeinsam zu einer möglichst fruchtbaren Lektüre zu gelangen. Dabei werden vor allem die Kapitel „Begriff der Aufklärung“ und „Kulturindustrie“ in den Fokus genommen, um sich kritisch mit dem, was allgemeinhin als Fortschritt verbucht wird, auseinanderzusetzen.

Teresa Palombo: Wave Function Ontology

Kursbeschreibung: Towards the end of the XX century, with Newton’s mechanics and Maxwell’s electrodynamics, physics had reached an almost complete description of reality. As many scientists claimed, there was nothing left to discover. With just a couple of adjustments, physics would have been complete. In trying to make those adjustments, however, quantum mechanics came to be. The narrative was flipped: classical laws did not hold in the realm of the infinitely small, reality was undetermined, particles also behaved as waves and waves as particles, observation changed the observed object. In order to account for all of that, physicists had to formulate new concepts, first and foremost the one of wave function. The wave function, that evolves according to the Schr¨odinger equation, represents the state of a physical system and collapses when a measurement is performed.

But what is it? Is it a probabilistic tool, a symbolic representation, or a real entity? What does it mean that it collapses? Can the whole universe be described as one wave function? And if it was the case, would the superposition of states suggest the existence of many words? These questions do not concern only physics, but our core conception of reality. They are about our way of being in the world and interacting with it; as humans, as observers, as physical systems ourselves. To use the words Bohr says to Heisemberg in the play “Copenhagen” by Michael Frayn:

"We put man back at the centre of the universe. . . . It starts with Einstein. He shows that measurement, on which the whole impossibility of science depends—measurement is a human act, carried out from a specific point of view in time and space, from the one particular viewpoint of a possible observer. Then, here in Copenhagen in those three years in the mid-twenties we discover that there is no precisely determinable objective universe. That the universe exists only as a series of approximations. Only within the limits determined by our relationship with it. Only through the understanding lodged inside the human head".

This group aims to be a space to explore and discuss the range of interpretative options, as well as their epistemological and ontological implications, by engaging with a combination of classical texts and contemporary philosophical work.

Praktische Philosophie

Maja Hilt: Tim Mulgan's Ethics for a Broken World. Imagining Philosophy After Catastrophe

Kursbeschreibung: Climate crises are worsening. We knew it would happen and we did not prevent it. Many philosophers wonder what we should have done and what we should do now in order to mitigate the crises already taking place. An equally important question that has received significantly less attention concerns the philosophy of our future selves and of future generations. What ethics should and will they adopt given that the resources of the world will be much scarcer and the weather much less predictable in a few decades?

In his book “Ethics for a Broken World. Imagining Philosophy After Catastrophe”, the philosopher Tim Mulgan addresses this question. Specifically, he wonders whether any aspects of our familiar ethics can be of help to future philosophy students wondering how to distrubute the few resources left. Mulgan goes through the major ethical and political theories of the last four centuries and discusses how they can be of use in a world that provides significantly different external circumstances. This approach makes his book interesting for both, experienced and inexperienced ethicists and political philosophers. The former are challenged by looking at familiar theories from an unusual perspective. The latter find everything they would learn in an introductiory ethics class just that the framing provides a little twist.

James Hepburn: Aquinas and Kant on the Foundations of Ethics

Kursbeschreibung: What is morality? Is it best characterized as a law or the perfection of one’s own nature? What is free will? And even if we can successfully argue for a proper conception of morality, can we prove it is real? Two great minds that gave relatively positive, but paradigmatically differing, answers to these questions are St. Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant. Because Aquinas’s and Kant’s thought were both situated in and engendered different philosophical traditions, contemporary philosophers often do not place their works side to side. But both had detailed and far-reaching things to say about these most human of questions, and so we may profit from letting their ideas battle it out.

We will look at these philosophers’ main systematic texts that give their account of the foundations of morality, the Summa Theologiae and Critique of Practical Reason, with some supplementary source texts and secondary literature. Sessions will be divided by topic and focus on comparing and contrasting and critically evaluating the premises, argumentation and conclusions of Aquinas and Kant on each. We will situate their intellectual concerns in their exciting and often unexpected historical contexts.

Geschichte der Philosophie

Leyi Fu: Wei-Jin Xuanxue (Neo-Daoism): Being, Non-Being, and the Order of Names

Kursbeschreibung: Xuanxue (Profound Learning), the dominant philosoqphical movement of third- and fourth-century China, reread the three Mysterious Texts — the Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Yijing — into a sophisticated metaphysics and a theory of political order. This course sets its two greatest figures against each other:
Wang Bi (226–249), the metaphysician of non-being: in his commentaries on the Laozi and Yijing he argues that the myriad things are grounded in wu (無, non-being) — “to take non-being as the root” (以無為本).
Guo Xiang (d. 312), the metaphysician of self-transformation: in his commentaries on Zhuangzi he rejects any grounding non-being — non-being, being nothing, cannot generate being — and replaces it with duhua (獨化), the self-so transformation by which each thing arises of itself.

The course is organized by a thread: the metaphysical dispute over being and non-being (有/無, 本/ 末) is mirrored by a practical dispute over the teaching of names and naturalness (名教/自然). Wang Bi grounds the social order in non-being (“names are rooted in naturalness”); Guo Xiang dissolves the ground and identifies the two (“names are naturalness”). The wager of the course is that a metaphysical choice generates a political form — which makes Xuanxue a compact case study in how ontology and political philosophy hang together.

A second thread runs throughout. Because both thinkers philosophize through commentary, the course continually meets the Xuanxue problem of words and meaning (言意之辨): how far a commentary transmits, and how far it transforms, the sense of its classic. The question is sharpest for Guo Xiang, whose reading is either a recovery or a rewriting of the Zhuangzi — a debate the course treats as a live
interpretive problem rather than settling in advance.

Lucas Menengat & Luisa Beloch: Sigmund Freuds Unbehagen in der Kultur

Kursbeschreibung: In den modernen westlichen Kulturen wird gemeinhin angenommen, dass die Menschheit durch den Fortschritt der Zivilisation verbessert wird. Indem wir unseren Urzustand hinter uns lassen, nähern wir uns dem Ideal des Menschseins an: einem glücklichen Plateau. Aber was wäre, wenn das Gegenteil der Fall wäre, wenn nämlich die Entwicklung der Zivilisation uns stattdessen zu einem andauernden Unbehagen hinführt? Ist es möglich, dass die zivilisierte Gesellschaft uns sicherer, aber unglücklich macht? Opfern wir zu viel, um den „Krieg aller gegen alle“ aufzuheben?

Das 1930 von Sigmund Freud veröffentlichte Werk Das Unbehagen in der Kultur folgt genau der kontraintuitiven Vorstellung, dass die Zivilisationsentwicklung – oder das, was Freud als „Kulturentwicklung“ bezeichnet – die ursprüngliche Triebanlage des Menschen verdrängt und uns somit in ein „psychologisches Elend“ führt.

In unserem Lektürekurs werden wir jede Woche gemeinsam ein Kapitel dieser Abhandlung analysieren. Ziel ist es, die zentralen Thesen sowie die im Werk behandelten Grundbegriffe der Psychoanalyse, wie den Lebens- und den Todestrieb und das Über-Ich, zu erarbeiten. Darüber hinaus werden Zusammenhänge zu anderen Autoren hergestellt, wie z. B. zu Nietzsche in Bezug auf die Genealogie der Moral, in der Konzepte des Ursprungs des Bösen, des schlechten Gewissens und des unbewussten Ichs vorkommen, die auch in Freuds Text eine wichtige Rolle spielen.

Interdisziplinär/Sonstige

Martin Blasi: Introduction to Philosophy of Economics

Kursbeschreibung: Economics plays a central role in contemporary societies, shaping public policy, social institutions, and everyday decision-making. At the same time, economics raises fundamental philosophical questions concerning explanation, scientific methodology, rationality, models, and normativity. This course offers a systematic introduction to the philosophy of economics at BA level.

The course focuses on classic and contemporary debates about the scientific status of economics, the role of idealisation and models, the nature of economic explanation, and the relationship between positive and normative economics. Readings are drawn primarily from The Philosophy of Economics: An Anthology edited by Daniel M. Hausman, supplemented by contextual explanations and secondary literature where necessary.