Closed Research Projects
Communicative Action and the Public Sphere in the Digital Age. What is about to change, what remains and how this is to be evaluated
Lisa Schurrers' dissertation project
Over the past few years, politics and research with respect to the public sphere has been strongly marked by debates surrounding digitalization and its consequences. The present project contributes to this discussion by emphasizing the theoretical communicative foundations of democratic societies. The main argument of the project is that a normative model of the democratic public sphere can be designed on the basis of an extended and critically considered concept of communicative action. This approach has three advantages. First, digitalization and automation processes can be examined in-depth. Second, extant and new power mechanism can be described more thoroughly. Third, both systemic distortions in communication as well as dysfunctions specifically related to democratic public spheres can be comprehensively identified. Such an understanding of the public sphere therefore creates the opportunity to organize discussions around new digital technologies. Phenomena or developments such as Twitter bots, media consumption via Facebook, conversations with one’s smartphone, or automated facial recognition algorithms that are used in public as part of predictive policing, can thereby be made comprehensible and can be linked to one another in the context of an analytical model, without however glossing over their differentiated societal impacts. Reference to background knowledge, as well as literature and studies on the latest technological developments ensures a sound empirical basis for the normative framework.
To achieve this, the project first establishes an understanding of the political public sphere. In this respect, most importantly, dynamics pertaining to questions about how one speaks, about what, and in which space, are examined. Furthermore, basic mechanisms of communication are considered. Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action is taken as the starting point. This approach seems particularly fruitful for the project, since it is based on a combination of agent and structural theories and thus allows one to both take the communicative practices of interpersonal relations seriously, as well as examine and criticize mechanisms of power. The Habermasian approach nevertheless also has some shortcomings in terms of technology and media philosophy, to which the present project responds. Particularly problematic is whether communication can still be adequately understood by means of a concept such as that of communicative action in times when communicative processes are often channelled through the media or when we often communicate with artificial interlocutors. Normative foundations are devised according to this critical revision, which in turn then justify the explicit functions of the political public sphere. Ultimately, these functions serve as a benchmark to classify and evaluate new digital public phenomena.
Critique of commonplaces [working title]
Jérôme Léchot's dissertation project
If one wants to get acquainted with the world, commonplaces here loosely conceived of as 'gotten-used-to ways of thinking and acting' (kognitive Üblichkeiten) play a constitutive role: only in a largely familiar and thereby 'foreknown' (e.g. Gail Fine) world are the paths to enlarged or more refined or correcting knowledge sketched out. However, such commonplaces best work in the dark: as soon as they themselves are put to light for critical scrutiny, we may see that not much more than the fact that we have gotten used to them speaks in their favour. That by itself is not yet a problem (unless one is skeptically minded), but it can turn into one in cases of conflict where one’s 'reasonable/sensible presupposition' turns out to be another’s 'has-grown-fond-of prejudice.' Are such conflicts best conceived of as colliding 'positive orders' (Foucault/Waldenfels), or may such a description curtail reason’s ability to push back the boarder of the 'gotten-used-to' (Eingewöhntes) in favour of the (more) reasonably treatable precisely because it knows about its operating presuppositions?
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger:
Ideas of Progress in Liberal Theory
Dr. Vanessa Rampton
Today the idea of progress, with its roots in Enlightenment optimism and respect for reason, is highly contested in academic circles. Partly because of liberalism’s historical commitment to universalism and ‘progressive’ thinking, the idea of progress has been portrayed as the prime fallacy of that tradition in particular, associated with unrealistic expectations about human beings becoming more rational through time. My research project – entitled Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: Ideas of Progress in Liberal Theory – aims to show that the idea of progress has and continues to play a seminal role in liberal political thinking, and that this is the source of both important strengths and deep tensions within the liberal tradition itself. More specifically, I propose to analyze the major theories of progress associated with the liberal tradition, and to make the case that liberalism itself contains the philosophical resources that can help define progress as more than a collection of meliorist fantasies. Crucial for this endeavour is exploring to what extent liberalism acknowledges that progress in one field may mean costs – or even regress – in another. Such a study of liberalism and progress has practical implications that go beyond the realm of theoretical philosophy. As globalization intensifies, the climate changes, technologies advance, and historians attempt to make sense of the moral failings of the twentieth-century, the idea of progress is once again at the centre of inquiries about how to live. Attempting to disentangle the relationship between liberalism and progress sheds light both on liberal theory and policy, and on the possibility of a theory of progress suited to the twenty-first century.
‘An Apple a Day’: Modern Medicine between Technology and Human Beings
Dr. Vanessa Rampton
As a Branco Weiss fellow, Dr. Vanessa Rampton will research the complex relationship between medicine’s technological successes and its persistently human nature. Her project explores the ambivalences inherent in the application of science to medical practice, and develops a framework for thinking about the ambiguities of both medical knowledge and ethics, as well as the way those are managed in a specific cultural context.
The notion that individual beings and entire societies can be perfected through time is deeply rooted in Western culture, and powerfully shapes the expectations and actions of both ordinary people and the decision-making elite. While modern medicine is sometimes touted as the prime example of how technology can improve human lives, a debate is currently underway about to what extent technological advances imply trade-offs or costs in other fields, and can be in tension with the wishes of patients they purport to serve. At stake are patients’ expectations as well as medicine's self-identity as a progressive enterprise, in which intervention is the favoured course of action.
This project aims to shed light on the complex relationship between medicine’s technological successes and its persistently human nature. Dr. Vanessa Rampton is developing a comprehensive account of a) the ambivalences inherent in the concept of medical progress and b) the persistent tensions between general advances in medical technology, and the concrete, lived experiences of human patients. It is a working hypothesis of this project that ambiguities are inherent in both medical knowledge and ethics, as well as in the cultural values that underpin any social consensus concerning best practices. The aim of this research is to provide a more contextualized view of current debates about improvements in medical practice, to clarify the limitations of both scientific progress and human skills and knowledge, and to help answer the question of how medicine can better cope with its ambiguities.
The Stability of Modern Democracies.
Normative Aspects and Social Presuppositions
Raphael Meyer's dissertation project
Democracies can undermine democratically the conditions of their functioning. In my PhD-project I will examine the answers which democratic theories give to this problem of democratic instability. And I will defend the assumption, that pre-political ways of acting in civil society are of high relevance for the prospect of democratic stability.
On the Nature of Moral Judgments
Silvan Moser's dissertation project
Moral judgments are answers to certain kinds of practical questions, that is practical questions we face as social beings who live together. Understanding their claim to validity in this way allows us to incorporate seemingly contradictory aspects of moral judgements into a general, coherent metaethical view.
Dealing with Ignorance
Dr. Nadja El Kassar
How are we to deal with our own ignorance and that of other people? If Aristotle is right in suggesting that human beings naturally strive for knowledge, then the obvious suggestion is that we need to turn ignorance into knowledge. But immediately this answer runs into various formal and structural obstacles, and therefore we have to ask ourselves whether this suggestion is correct. The project approaches this question by developing a broad conception of ignorance and asking at the general level which ways of dealing with ignorance are rational ones.
What are Moral Beliefs?
Laura Hinn’s dissertation project
What are the different ways of entertaining moral beliefs? Are moral beliefs necessarily connected with a motivation to act? Answers to these questions will be elaborated with reference to externalism and internalism in ethics.
How are Justifications Established and Made Possible?
On the Functioning and Structure of Rationality
Romila Storjohann's disseration project
Generally speaking, rationality or reason is the main object of study of this thesis. On the one hand, the function of rationality - understood as the practice of giving and asking for reasons - will be examined in detail (I). On the other hand, based on this analysis, the structural components of, as well as the enabling and constituent requirements for rationality shall be considered (II). Two questions, therefore, are at the center of this dissertation and they are: I) How are reasons formed? II) How is the formation of reasons generally possible?
Unfolding the Northern Archives; A case of Integrated Knowledge
Dr. Xenia Vytuleva
Trained as an art historian, with a background in philosophy and semiotics, Dr. Vytuleva is examining new translations of the North into visual codes, connected to new ecologies of knowledge production and knowledge transfer. This research project seeks to interrogate the entanglement of cultural and cognitive studies along political conflicts and environmental thresholds. North remains one of the most complex cultural and political constructs in history of humanity. An extreme, distant, symbolically charged territory, where myth and Gestalt, political ambitions and ecological challenges collide. North - is a utopian land for human futures, a tabula rasa for architectural fantasies and a battlefield for resources and territorial power. The exploration of North is compared to the exploration of Cosmos. It features eternity, solitude, and frost. North is where the boundaries of the visual apparatus are radically extended: from complete darkness – to blinding light, so blinding that nothing can be seen. Serving as a realization of planetary limit and limit at large: it is a representation of death and abyss, a sub-script of the sublime. It includes, but also transcends, the duration of anthropogenic climate change.
The ambition of this project is to draft a new atlas of Northern archaeologies, to identify the connectedness of different domains of knowledge by communicating traditional northern archives with the unconventional ways to explore the new data. Northern archives – appears to be a rare mode of the integrated knowledge, knowledge as the whole, with a special emphasis on the medical archives of the most common polar human diseases: snow blindness, amnesia and insanity. These archives may become the foundation of a new form of media, providing a methodological toolbox for looking at radically ‘other’ territories, namely a politically and ideologically charged global pole. Reading the phenomenon of the Northern archives on the shared territory of natural sciences, governance and humanities, cultural mapping and future visions, might allow to establish an experimental, yet solid platform for new modality of thinking.
The Endangered Citizen.
Normative and Empirical Investigations of the Relationship between Democracy, the Market, and the Welfare State
Lukas Adams’s dissertation project
Normative and Empirical Investigations of the Relationship between Democracy, the Market and the Welfare State. Further information to follow.
"Prozesse und Funktionen des Erkennens in ästhetischer Erfahrung"
Dr. Anna Kreysing
Further information about the project