Max Deeg presents a paper on 'Multiple Individualities – The Many Identities of the Chinese Buddhist Monk Xuanzang'

This paper tries to bring into conversation the results and ideas of the KFG „Religöse Individualisierung in historischer Perspektive“ and the material and the sources I am working with. I changed the structure and content of the original draft I had in the light of the discussions in the plenary session and some of the colloquia which had a direct impact on my material and my approach. I found the framework of individualisation particularly helpful for my attempts to de-historisize the biographical material, i.e. to move it away from the positivist reading which is still very much en vogue in the academic field I am working in. I read the biographies as expressions of narrative individualisation through which the same „individual“ can be imagined and appropriated in different ways with different intentionalities and purposes for which I tentatively introduce the term „function“ (to be developed, if feasible at all, into a concept). The paper is therefore a combination of information and material from my „database“ and some deliberations about how this could fit into the wider discourse about individualisation.
The wider project which leads to a series of sub-projects is a new English translation and extensive historical commentary of and to Xuanzang’s „Record of the Western Regions“ written in the 7th century and having had a huge impact in East Asia and on western historical scholarship of Asia. The present paper is part of this main project insofar the latter will include all the relevant material and its analysis and discussion that is connected with Xuanzang and his text, particularly the various biographical traditions and the author’s and the text’s reception history (Rezeptionsgeschichte) which have to be analyzed in their respective contexts. The paper was originally conceived as a to be modified chapter for a monograph on Xuanzang and his wider context requested by Oxford University Press India which can also be used as an introductory complement to the rather bulky and specialized translation cum commentary, meant to be published in installments.

Knud Haakonssen presents a paper 'To know yourself – that’s a whole crowd! Ludvig Holberg as a case study of multiple authorial personae'

This is a revised and expanded version of a lecture that I gave at the Gotha Forschungszentrum in January. The reason for reviving the paper is that it addresses central issues discussed in the KFG plenaries preparing for the end time (cf. the theses from Martin Mulsow and me). The paper is thus not part of my project on natural law. Nor is it theoretical, or methodological, in character; rather, it provides a case study of multiple authorial personae, namely, the work of the Danish polymath Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754). I show how Holberg uses the techniques of contemporary eclecticism in a wide variety of works and genres of works. I suggest that this goes along with an espistemic attitude that is somewhat different from the usual moderate scepticism often associated with eclecticism. And I indicate how a many-sided ambiguity about the supposedly ‘real’ author is effected in order to secure space for a basic, somewhat simplistic but earnest religiosity without jeopardising the pervasive pluralism. A key factor here is the ‘creation’ of the audience, including the scholars who nearly three centuries later pursue the real Holberg. But he, too, is always a persona for an audience. The conclusion – if any – is that it is a kind of category mistake to ask what ‘he’ really believed.

Arthur Bueno presented a paper on: 'The Psychic Life of Freedom: Social Pathology and its Symptoms'

This paper discusses the relationship between Honneth's intersubjective theory of recognition and his political theory of democratic ethical life by addressing the potentials and difficulties attached to the concept of social pathology. Taking into account the diverse uses of this concept throughout Honneth's oeuvre, it focuses initially on two of its formulations: first, the more recent discussions presented in “Die Krankheiten der Gesellschaft” (2014), some of which can be read in continuity with arguments presented in Das Recht der Freiheit (2011); second, an implicit conception of social pathology which can be found in Kampf um Anerkennung (1992). These formulations involve contrastingly different premises with regard to phenomenological, methodological, social ontological and etiological matters. I argue that such differences can be better grasped if one bears in mind two distinctive ways of understanding the fundamental intuition at the basis of the notion of social pathology: either as an analogy or as an homology. By explicating some of the actual or potential discrepancies between both conceptions, the intention is to outline the grounds on which they could be brought together within the framework of a comprehensive concept of social pathology. Having this in mind, I then examine a third conception of social pathology which was first presented in Leiden an Unbestimmtheit (2001) and later developed, with some restrictions, in Das Recht der Freiheit (2011).
This paper is part of a larger project which aims at exploring the social theoretical and normative foundations of the concept of social pathology. However, it was not written as the chapter of a future book or Habilitation dissertation, but rather as the first draft of an article. The text was originally presented in the workshop “Freiheit und Anerkennung – eine Verhältnisbestimmung”, dedicated to internal readings of Axel Honneth's works, with a special interest in the relations between his early theory of recognition and his recent political theory. Although the reconstruction of Honneth's concept of social pathology is not the primary aim of my research at the MWK, some of the topics discussed in the paper will likely be further developed in the project. Particularly relevant is the distinction between analogical and homological conceptions of social pathology and their different underlying assumptions regarding the phenomenology, methodology, social ontology and etiology of such phenomena.

Knud Haakonssen presents a paper on 'To know yourself – that’s a whole crowd! Ludvig Holberg as a case study of multiple authorial personae'

This is a revised and expanded version of a lecture that I gave at the Gotha Forschungszentrum in January. The reason for reviving the paper is that it addresses central issues discussed in the KFG plenaries preparing for the end time (cf. the theses from Martin Mulsow and me). The paper is thus not part of my project on natural law. Nor is it theoretical, or methodological, in character; rather, it provides a case study of multiple authorial personae, namely, the work of the Danish polymath Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754). I show how Holberg uses the techniques of contemporary eclecticism in a wide variety of works and genres of works. I suggest that this goes along with an espistemic attitude that is somewhat different from the usual moderate scepticism often associated with eclecticism. And I indicate how a many-sided ambiguity about the supposedly ‘real’ author is effected in order to secure space for a basic, somewhat simplistic but earnest religiosity without jeopardising the pervasive pluralism. A key factor here is the ‘creation’ of the audience, including the scholars who nearly three centuries later pursue the real Holberg. But he, too, is always a persona for an audience. The conclusion – if any – is that it is a kind of category mistake to ask what ‘he’ really believed.

Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli gives a paper on '“I Have Nothing Else To Live By”: Religious Individualization as Comfort-Zone Religiosity (Tertullian vs. Idol-Makers; On Idolatry 3-8)'

This essay is interested in testing the epistemic reliability and the critical reach of the individualization focus of the “Live Ancient Religion” project. In my opinion, such a check-up demands (a) to draw attention to the diverse constraints and conditioning biases with which the individual agency is woven together; (b) to highlight the accommodationist scope of some individual appropriations of religious systems as comfort-zone religiosities. I elected Tertullian’s On Idolatry 3-8 as a case study. These few pages correspond to the literary framing and rhetorical embellishment of the author’s occasional confrontations with the arguments of some Carthaginian Christian “idol-makers”, who, when asked, advocated in different ways the religious-moral legitimacy of their job. Developing a multi-layered approach to the individualization processes, my analytic strategy is twofold: while attempting to theoretically discomfort religious individualization by pointing at its multiple obstacles, I describe also Tertullian’s efforts to concretely interfere with too comfortable and socially adequate appropriations of Christian beliefs and practices. In this sense, this paper aims to indirectly criticize the “feel-good spirituality” that underlies any palatable and marketoriented survey on ‘personal religions’, and thus to distance itself from such questionable enterprises.
The essay is part of a larger project on 't Forbidden Jobs: Making a Living as a Jesus Follower in the Roman Empire':
This project is a thematic expansion and a methodological refinement of the research conducted, in the last three years, at the crossroads of early and late ancient Christian studies. The aim of the enquire was to sketch the fading profile of the Jesus follower engaged in public-political affairs before Constantine and the “Christianisation” of the Roman state, thereby attempting to answer to the following question: how and how far a Greco-Roman officeholder could appropriate, embody, adapt and innovate (at least) a part of the Christian set of experiences, beliefs and practices, without being forced to quit his honours and public duties? This line of research, which tries to capitalize on Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory of action, while integrating it with more self-centred perspectives at the intersection of dispositions and strategies, could be profitably extended to other empirical domains. Politics, i.e., ruling and administrating political communities, is definitely not the only sphere of socio-symbolic production where an objective tension between different forms of commitment and interest may be felt by believers in Jesus and influence their private and public behaviours. Other occupations, activities and trades are equally involved in the interplay between Christian normative definitions of an appropriated religious conduct, related expectations from both religious authorities and “significant others”, and material interests in accomplishing social duties, doing businesses and holding tasks provided by the current socio-economic system. Within this perspective, a “forbidden job” is no more an indisputable ban coming from an overwhelming authority. What is a forbidden job in the eye of the Christian (prescribing and writing) beholders might turn into a matter of religious appropriation and innovation from the point of view of the Christian professional and worker: a spot where “practical individuality” is at stake. In this sense, to advocate an analysis at the level of the individual should not lead to underrate the question of how historically deep-rooted and structured relations of power create dispositions to act. Why, how, to what extent, under which material conditions and social conditioning do Christian people obey to normative discourses about “how much religious they are when they make a living in everyday life”? A suitable answer should probably bypass both interactionist and hard structuralist lines of theorizing. Rather, it presupposes a sociological theory of embodied powers which, while taking institutions and agencies of power seriously, is also acquainted with the idea of a subject storing a plurality of dispositions ready to be strategically activated in a plurality of situations. Succeeding in these socially conditioned performances may be the magic formula of a religious appropriation.

Roman Madzia gives a paper on 'Mind, Symbol, and Action-Prediction: George H. Mead and the "Embodied" Roots of Language'

The pragmatist philosopher George Herbert Mead is arguably one of the most original but at the same time neglected thinkers of embodiment. The paper ‘Mind, Symbol, and Action-Prediction: George H. Mead and the ‘Embodied’ Roots of Language’ presents Mead’s radically embodied and anti-intellectualist view of language and symbolic behavior. The paper develops a Meadian perspective on the phenomenon of the participatory, embodied sense-making called language and connects it with Jakob Hohwy’s theory of ‘prediction error minimization’ in order to elucidate the role which symbolic thinking plays in the process of action-understanding. It also demonstrates the way in which Mead understood significant symbols as encoding environmental and social affordances. Further, the paper re-defines some key concepts of philosophy of language like that of meaning, reference, intension and extension, etc. Finally, it also demonstrates that the classical pragmatist understanding of concepts such as goal-directedness of action, resolution of action-problems, etc., is indispensable if we want to come up with a persuasive account of embodied roots of linguistic behavior.

Nature and Culture - an International Conference (Ontario, May 5th and 6th, 2016)

Keynote Speaker

Prof. Dr. Hartmut Rosa, Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena and 
Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt (Germany)

The conference will be held over two days, on May 5th and 6th on the campus of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton and will bring together senior scholars from Canada, Germany, Mexico and the United States with junior colleagues and graduate students who will present papers on their work in the areas covered by Lawrence Krader’s major work, Noetics and related fields.

The main reference work for the background to the conference is: Lawrence Krader (2010). Noetics: The Science of Thinking and Knowing. (C. Levitt, ed.). Peter Lang: New York. Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Bern, Frankfurt, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Oxford.

An intellectual biography of Krader and an overview of Noetics, are contained in the Preface and Introduction to that work, written by C. Levitt and can be downloaded from the website:http://lawrencekrader.com/content/noetics.

If you are interested in working on any of the unpublished manuscripts in conjunction with the project, please contact one or the other of the conference organizers.

Conference Outline

The conference will aim to take up a number of themes developed in Krader’s Noetics that bear a relationship to many aspects and lines of development in a variety of intellectual traditions including: Pragmatism, Critical Theory, Symbolic Interactionism, and Anthropology. Krader maintained a correspondence with John Dewey in the late thirties and engaged in discussions with Sidney Hook around the same time. In 1957 he was offered a job by Adorno and Horkheimer at their Institut für Sozialforschung which he declined. His development of a theory of self, person and persona has significant points of contact with that of George Herbert Mead and like Mead, Krader was concerned with the human being’s place in nature. One of Krader’s major points of emphasis in Noetics is related to a new theory of nature and the role of culture within it. Having won the coveted Ketchum Prize in the history of philosophy at CCNY as a senior undergraduate, and having begun a study of the philosophical implications of quantum theory along with developments in the history of mathematics, Krader argued that nature is not reducible to matter but rather contains within it – and there is nothing beyond nature – different orders which vary according to their different systems of space-time. In theory there may be n-orders of nature, but Krader identified three: the material order, the quantum order and the human order. These three orders of nature are related by nexus and difference and their interrelations are to be understood in terms of Leibniz’s theory of passage. Whereas the material order of nature is concrete, ‘thingly’ and direct, the human order is abstract and concrete, objective and subjective, and in which relations are mediate and immediate. In Noetics Krader takes up the dualisms of German Idealism, which include along with those mentioned above: thinking and knowing, theory and practice, mind and body, structure and agency, activity and passivity, among many others, and integrates them into his theory of the human order, arguing that they constitute the differentia specifica of the human order of nature. With Krader’s theory one can read the history of the relationship between nature and culture in a different light. Durkheim, especially in the The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, struggled to understand sociology as a natural science of culture, but he was faced with a nature that was homogenous and dominated by the materialist model. George Herbert Mead in his posthumously published work, Mind, Self and Society began with Darwin and argued that out of the biotic social organization of the gregarious animals a symbolic social order was extruded which could not simply be reduced to the material-biotic order. Krader systematizes this view and argues that whereas we can talk of evolution in the material order, we speak of development in the human order of nature. By means of this international conference and workshop, we will examine the relationship between nature and culture in the approaches of Pragmatism, Symbolic Interactionism, and Critical Theory.

The presentations during the conference will take in aspects of the following areas and theoretical approaches: Symbolic Interactionism, Cultural Theory, Sociology of Knowledge, Arts and Aesthetics, Language and linguistic theory, and Neuroscience.

On the second day of the conference, a workshop will be held at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre featuring an exhibition of biographical material related to a number of New York Jewish intellectuals who participated in the passionate Alcove One debates at City College during the late 1930s, and a panel discussion based on the book and documentary Arguing the World (1998) will be led by Prof. Dr. Neil McLaughlin, from McMaster University. In addition, a presentation of material from Krader’s period at CCNY in relation to his interactions with the other budding New York intellectuals will be on display. Theoretical or empirical papers that relate their data or theoretical reflections back to one of these traditions, or to the various fields covered by Noetics (2010) are welcome. One of the key concerns of the conference is to take one of the two days into the community as a key element of outreach as part of the university’s mandate. The conference aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed edited volume.

Lawrence Krader was born in New York City on December 9, 1919. Although not a famous public intellectual, he was offered appointments to America’s top-ranked universities over the years. He began his studies at the City College of New York (CCNY) in 1937 where he studied philosophy with Morris Raphael Cohen, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1941. His excellence in the area of the history of philosophy won him the covered Ketchum Prize in that field.

In 1939 he spent a year at the University of Chicago with Rudolf Carnap, after which he returned to CCNY to serve as Alfred Tarski’s research assistant. (Tarski came to CCNY after Bertrand Russell’s appointment was blocked by the NYC administration of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Krader was to have served as Russell’s research assistant). At City Krader helped Tarski translate his book Introduction to Logic from Polish into English, an effort which Tarski acknowledged in the Introduction to this translation.

Krader was appointed to a position at the Far Eastern Institute at the University of Washington in 1947 by Karl August Wittfogel. It was there that Krader met and befriended Karl Korsch who had come to visit his old friend Wittfogel. Korsch and his wife Hedda were then domiciled in Cambridge, MA and Krader continued his friendship with Korsch when he moved to Cambridge to begin his doctoral studies at Harvard University in 1949. It was at Korsch’s behest that Krader transcribed, edited and introduced The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (1972).

Krader turned down several offers of appointment to Harvard University where he completed his doctoral dissertation in 1954 on “The Kinship Systems of the Altaic-speaking Peoples of the Asiatic Steppe.” Just prior to completing his doctorate, he married Dr. Barbara Lattimer, an accomplished linguist and ethno-musicologist, whom he had met while attending Roman Jakobson’s graduate linguistic seminar at Columbia University where his future wife served as Jakobson’s research assistant.

Krader taught anthropology at the University of Ohio, the University of Syracuse and the City University of New York, as well as linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was offered a position in linguistics by Ithiel de Sola Pool. From 1969-1972 he was the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

His last academic appointment was as Professor and Director of the Insitut für Ethnologie at the Freie Universität Berlin from 1972 to 1982. As Professor Emeritus he composed more than 150 manuscripts on a wide variety of topics in philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, history and related disciplines until his death on November 15, 1998.

He endowed The Lawrence Krader Research Project at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario under the direction of Prof. Cyril Levitt. The Project has been functioning since May 2008 having published two of Krader’s collections of manuscripts including Labor and Value (2003) and Noetics (2010).

 

Mads Langballe Jensen on 'Immoderate licentiousness in philosophising' or 'the liberty of a learned man': a conflict between theologians and lawyers in the early Danish enlightenment

The paper follows up on certain suggestions in my previous Kolloquium paper concerning the significance of Pufendorfian-Thomasian natural law in the first decades of the eighteenth century in Denmark, particularly in the controversy surrounding Andreas Hojer's Diagramma de Nuptiis Propinquorum Iure divino non prohibitis. It looks at the meta-arguments, so to speak, in Hojer's and the theologians' letters to King Frederik IV, which turned on the question on who had the authority to judge on matters pertaining to natural law, and how far the liberty to discuss social and political issues in public extended. It argues that the affair was part of a conflict over authority between lawyers and theologians in the decades around 1700 and illustrative of it.

Mark Porter is presenting a paper on 'Singing, resonance and ascetic struggle'

In my work at Max-Weber I am interested in exploring ideas of resonance in relation to Christian congregational music. In contrast to common contemporary ideals of authenticity, the idea of resonance allows the opportunity to foreground bi-directional back and forth relationships in sonic, social and spiritual realms. Through a series of exploratory case studies I am exploring the nature of such relationships and the potential for such an approach to illuminate and bring together aspects of congregational music not typically foregrounded in this manner.

Following my previous exploration of theories of resonance, in this paper I explore my first case study: the 4^th century desert fathers. The music of the desert rarely takes a prominent role in discussions of church music history, we have no surviving musical scores, we have no grand theories about the role and nature of music, in fact we have remarkably little discussion of it whatsoever. It is not a moment which obviously serves to advance musical composition in any substantial way, and music is very much a background rather than foreground presence in most of the surviving writings. In contrast to such neglect, I suggest that attention to patterns of resonance, and an exploration of singing within its broader bodily, spiritual and spatial ecology serves to illuminate desert psalmody, presenting with utmost clarity an individual’s struggle as they attempt to pursue with single-minded, but often- frustrated determination their path of spiritual and bodily destruction, formation and witness.

David Strecker presents a paper on 'Slavery as Exclusive Inclusion'

Identifying slavery only with chattel slavery obscures how fundamental factors which allowed for the latter remain effective today in that they buttress contemporary slavery. Only an integrative framework for analyzing the different forms of slavery sheds light on connections, on continuities, on the transformation of practices and institutions. The claim this paper sets forth is that an underlying logic connecting the different forms of slavery continues to be at work today. I suggest that slavery is best understood as exclusive inclusion. The argument which aims to elucidate this concept proceeds in three steps: first I turn to the established attempts to define slavery; this leads me to introduce the concept of exclusive inclusion which sheds light on the historical development of slavery; and finally I will look at the implications of this concept for general social theory and the political struggle to overcome slavery by focusing on how it bears on our understanding of social reproduction.

Louis-Philippe Vien presents a paper on 'John Stuart Mill And The Asian Parable'

Between the hagiographies following in the wake of Marianne Weber's Lebensbild, Mommsen’s Wegbereiter thesis, and the works of those who see in him an insightful political scientist, Max Weber’s political thought is the object of massively different interpretations. With the help of Pocock’s theory of political languages I intend to shed light on the English influences of Weber’s conception of modern politics. In this I follow the intuitions of Günther Roth in his Work on “Weber The Would-be-Englishman”. But where his writings are based on the economic history of Weber’s extended family, I want to investigate the structure of his political thoughts as to reveal how Weber’s political ideas, if often described as unique and extraordinary in the German context of his time, is based on interrogations and themes that would appear as common for late-Victorians. In order to identify the common tensions upon which a shared political language is articulated, I compare Weber's writing on politics with those of two iconic Victorian political authors, namely Walter Bagehot and John Stuart Mill. From their (I) historiography, to their conception of the parliamentary institutions, be it their roles as tools of state administration (II) or in their influence on the political education of the nation (III), or in their relation to (IV) Statesmanship, what reveals itself is a shared conception of modern politics, a common view of the necessity of strong parliamentary institutions in modern states, and an adherence to the short-lived brand of agonistic liberalism.