We are glad to give notice of the next session of the Leuven Seminar in Classical German Philosophy, which will take place online on April 23rd, at 17:00. Giulia Bernard (University of Padova) will present the paper The Discursive Execution of Philosophy: Hegel’s Berlin Conception of Philosophy.

After a short introduction by Giulia Bernard and a response from Ioanna Bartsidi (Université Paris Nanterre), the session will be devoted to a discussion of the paper, which everyone is invited to read beforehand. The paper can be found on the website of the Leuven Seminar.

Please register through the website in order to receive the Zoom link. Events are recorded and made available on the YouTube platform of the research group.

The Leuven Seminar in Classical German Philosophy is organized by Karin de Boer, Luis Felipe Garcia, and Manuel Tangorra.

Below you can find the abstract of the paper.

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Abstract

What does it mean to determine the status of philosophy—its boundaries, methods, and practices—at a moment in which its critical and transformative capacity appears to be in question? Focusing on Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, this paper addresses this question by investigating philosophy’s discursive execution, that is, the way in which it is reproduced, transmitted, and justified as a form of scientific knowledge. It argues that philosophy can account for its own scientificity only by reflecting on the conditions of its own reproduction, i.e., its institutional settings, its modes of exposition, and the formation of the subjects who engage in it. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I identify two preliminary difficulties: the split between philosophy’s objective (formative) and absolute (self-critical) dimensions, and the risk that its self-justification relies on unexamined images of its task. Second, I show how Hegel in the Encyclopedia addresses these difficulties performatively, namely, by enacting an immanent critique of abstractions as they operate both in Bildung and critique. Third, I argue that Hegel, against Bourdieu’s critique, not only objectifies the conditions of philosophical discourse, but also reconfigures the question of philosophy’s status, redefining Bildung and critique at the level of philosophy’s execution.