-Tuesday 31 January, 12 pm CET (UTC+1)
Prof. Dr. Daisuke Kamei, Ritsumeikan University Kyoto, Japan: "Jacques Derrida and Shūzō Kuki: On Contingency and Event"
Abstract
I would like to do an attempt of comparative consideration between Japanese philosopher Shūzō Kuki (1888-1941) and French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). In his essay titled "Metaphysical Time"(1931), Kuki says that "the once-only and infinite life is worth living". In my view, this apparently paradoxical term "the once-only and infinite" expresses the core of the time theory of Kuki. On the other hand, Derrida uses a similar expression. For example, he says, "the event cannot appear to be an event, when it appears, unless it is already repeatable in its very uniqueness", that is, he proposes the "idea of uniqueness as immediately iterable" (in his essay in 1997, "A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event"). It seems that these two formulations share something in common in the fact that both have the same philosophical task to think at the same time the singular uniqueness and the infinite iterability.
How can we bring these two formulations together? Although both have different shades of meaning, couldn't we argue that the two correspond to one another very profoundly? I would like to make clear the measurable proximity between the philosophy of Kuki and the thinking of Derrida. For this purpose, I would like to make a correlation between Kuki's contingency theory in his book The Problem of Contingency (1935) and Derrida's thinking of the event, which is also no other than the thinking of contingency.
-February, 8th, 7pm (CET)
Prof. Dr. María Jimena Solé, University of Buenos Aires: “The Early Reception of Fichte in Latin America: Juan Bautista Alberdi”
Abstract:
In 1837, Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810-1884), one of the most relevant Argentine thinkers of his generation, inaugurated the reception of Fichte in Latin American territory. Alberdi mentions Fichte in a note at the end of his Preliminary Fragment to the Study of Law and again, a few years later, in a brief programmatic writing entitled “Ideas to Preside over the Preparation of the Course of Contemporary Philosophy”. I will argue that despite the geographical distance and cultural differences that set them apart, it is possible to find a deep affinity between Fichte’s and Alberdi’s positions and thoughts. Sharing an affinity to a philosophy of history based on the idea of progress, both made freedom the central theme of their meditations and attributed philosophy an emancipating role. Thus, concentrating on some passages of the two works in which Alberdi mentions Fichte and on other writings produced around the same time, my proposal is to find Fichte’s spirit in the letter of this young Argentinean thinker.