Humans have a natural tendency to categorise their actions as ›successes‹ or ›failures‹, and to focus on the former. This is true despite that fact that outside some few highly formalised contexts the meanings of these two terms are unclear and also, at best, ambiguous. Furthermore, in very many domains of human life failures turn out to be more interesting and more important than ostensible successes.

Broken trust elicits two types of responses: On the one hand, an epistemic response: How could I be so mistaken? How can I learn to trust more appropriately? On the other hand, a moral response: How could you deceive me so deeply and hurt me so profoundly? Even though the response in a given case may be more epistemically or morally emphasized, their interrelation raises two theoretically challenging questions: (1) How can a unity of the epistemic and normative dimensions of (...) trust be reflected in theories; thus far, these dimensions tend to diverge in predominant approaches that model trust either epistemically or normatively (e.g. evidential vs. assurance view). (2) How can it be understood that it is constitutive of trust that it can be broken, and that it is constitutive of trust that there is no risk in the very essence of trusting. The present paper proposes a response to these two questions. (shrink)

The article sketches two accounts of failure. On a broadly Aristotelian view, failure is conceived as the privation of success; on a view I call existential failure, failure and the capacity to begin anew are seen as explanatorily more basic than success. I distinguish three types of existential failure with regard to (i) individual existence, (ii) a cultural system, (iii) humanity as a whole. While the senses in which agents fail are different on each case, an underlying feature of failing (...) in its different instances is its indirect affirmation of human freedom. To be free is to be capable of failure. I conclude by contrasting these two accounts with the scenario of human extinction. Is it a failure if our species ceases to exist? Drawing on Hans Jonas, I argue that here the contrast between excess and failure returns in a different form. (shrink)

Failure is a dramatic experience to be distinguished from mere lack of success. As a social process, failure is measured against the norms of the institutions within which failure occurs. The article uses four examples to examine whether failure necessarily involves self-attribution. When is it merely an external attribution? Failure would then be associated with self-deception, which initially protects the person who fails. The text identifies five phases that are typical of failure processes.

In this paper, conceptions of the failure of the human species in the philosophy of history that can be found in the thought of Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno will be presented. Before that, some aspects of Hegel’s metaphysics have to be recapitulated as background, even if Hegel’s conception of the philosophy of history cannot be inserted into the constellation spanned here. Finally, it will be discussed how the failure of the human species can be philosophically thematized beyond framings in a (...) philosophy of history. (shrink)

Plato’s dialogues often end in a seemingly unsatisfactory conclusion, or aporia. Such aporetic endings are regularly interpreted as examples of Socratic irony, in which Socrates mocks his interlocutors by feigning ignorance and deliberately leading them into an aporia. Alternatively, they are seen as reflecting skepticism about the attainment of certain and consistent empirical knowledge. This paper revisits Plato’s Euthyphro and argues that the arguments and attempts at definition provide methodological criteria for the acquisition of knowledge and do not fail entirely, (...) but only in certain aspects. It shows how a new, comprehensive understanding of piety can be developed by collecting the unrefuted, fragmented insights on piety from Euthyphro and integrating them with pieces of knowledge from the Politeia. The paper also explores the reasons for the deliberate presentation of failure in the Aporetic dialogues, namely to highlight the pitfalls of believing in one’s illusory expertise about something without fully understanding it, and thus to encourage the pursuit of sound, reliable knowledge by overcoming ›double ignorance‹. (shrink)

Can failure be aesthetic or artistic? How can failure be described as an aesthetic phenomenon or as a work of art? Starting from a concept of aesthetic experience and presence this paper seeks answers to said question in four steps. After defining the event ›failure‹ (I), its aesthetic potential is determined (II), and distinguished from failure as art and the artfulness of failure (III). Finally, the significance of the aesthetic experience of failure for its existential understanding is examined (IV).

Recent culture wars, as fueled by right-wing extremists and warmongers over an identitarian and biologistic understanding of culture, require philosophy of culture to contradict and articulate its self-understanding. The article is structured along four theses that contest widespread assumptions, unfold their problematics and outline perspectives of cultural philosophy: 1. culture is not a being 2. critique is not enmity 3. technology is not a doom 4. history is not destiny.

The expression >the end of nature nature culture technology<. Following Latour and Haraway, the essay shows how the ecological crisis is related to the categorical distinctions in which the concept of nature was bound. The removal of the corresponding conceptual contrasts can lead to a more concise perception of the human situation.

Philosophy of culture is understood as a theory of the objective mind. On the one hand, this means a demarcation from other options, for example, from cultural criticism, from cultural studies and cultural history. On the other hand, it evokes an interweaving of descriptive procedures and normative interpretations, the systematic framework of which is laid down in Hegel's philosophy of mind.

Traditionally, the concept of culture implicates some form of expectation. However, this enhancement caused a status of marginalisation: Culture changed to sophisticated culture. Apart from this conceptual development, there is a somewhat matter-of-fact comprehension of culture which was neglected for a long time in cultural theory: In early Enlightenment, it was Blaise Pascal who deduced from common convictions and agreements the originary condition of culture which has become independent and thus determines the systems of faith and knowledge.

Three phases of a cultural-philosophical criticism can be distinguished during the last 100 years: Firstly, the metaphysical critique of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Adorno, secondly, the poststructuralist critique of representation as put forward by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida and thirdly ecological critiques as a countermovement, as emanating from Speculative Realism, New Materialism, and Latour's Actor-Network-Theory. Beyond critiques of rationality and of power and discourse, ecological critiques situate the human being in the exterior, which in some traits allows a (...) vitalism of matter to return. Most importantly, ecologism, where it sees itself as relationalism, confuses network relations with interpersonal relationships, which are always already socially terminated. Consequently, they prefer ontology over social philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophy of culture and philosophical anthropology are coextensive: We find this insight confirmed in Beschreibung des Menschen (from the Nachlass 2006). The essay sketches Blumenberg's basic idea that distance is the a priori condition of human existence, which is realized in culture as the general medium of mediation, and it shows the conciseness that Blumenberg's philosophy of culture gains in the systematic connection with the two works, in whose temporal proximity it was written: Arbeit am Mythos and Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer (...) (both 1979). Noteworthy is the finding that the distance figure of the spectator (Zuschauer) does not testify to the author's interest in aesthetics. (shrink)

The text asks how the philosophy of culture can contribute to current debates in the social and cultural sciences. Using the discussion on >cultural identity cultural appropriation< as examples, it then shows how divergent understandings of culture can lead to problematic assumptions. In the end, it is argued that the relationship between the philosophy of culture and the cultural and social sciences should be seen as an interrelationship in which the philosophy of culture must modify its concepts as well.

Nature is what culture relates to, and culture is what the mind makes of the conditions in which it finds itself. Whether the concept of second nature opens up a more interesting way of thinking about the anthropological problem, that consists in the opposition between mind and nature, is examined in the following contribution, in the light of a debate that arose around John McDowell's book Mind and World. The guiding thesis is that an ontology of mental being is needed (...) to explain the mind's peculiar way of referring to the absent in a present way. (shrink)

Cultural philosophy must always fathom anew what it means to live in a reflexive, self-reflexive culture of relativisation - in a culture that not only allows but forces the most diverse points of view. A culture in which nothing and no one secures the ultimate truth, the ultimate objectivity. Modern culture is a great possibility-generating enterprise. Cultural philosophy can conceptually express and bring to light the cultural potential for self-relativisation, the potential for self-reflection.