1. Political Philosophy Seminars 2023-2025
The following syllabi comprise a series of three seminars in continental philosophy for the 2023-2024 academic calendar in the departments of philosophy at Syracuse University, U.S. (my home institution) and Charles University, Prague, during the fall of 2024 when I will be a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, between October-December 2024. A third seminar is anticipated to be conducted in the department of philosophy at Charles University (host institution) in conjunction with the fall 2025 period of the Fulbright Fellowship, if successful. The theme of the seminars is consecrated to study “fundamental problems of Marxism” in the tradition of continental philosophy and is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. The first seminar addresses the idea of “the statesman” and focuses primarily on the tradition of Marxist theory in continental philosophy; the second seminar addresses the idea of “perpetual peace” in post-revolutionary history and philosophy with an emphasis on the later political philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Finally, a third seminar will address the idea of “the end of History” in the post-Hegelian and Marxist tradition of continental philosophy. The first installment of this seminar will be offered in the department of philosophy at Syracuse University, spring semester 2025.
1. PHI 400: Fundamental Problems of Marxism: The Statesman
Syracuse University, Spring 2023
Will not the knowledge of it [the good] then have a great influence on life [bion]? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is, and of which of the sciences or capacities it is object. It would seem to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the master art. And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a polity. --Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,” trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, p. 1729 (1094a 19)
Seminar Description
This will be the first in a series of spring seminars on problems in the Marxist-Leninist tradition of historical materialism and dialectical philosophy focusing on the Science of the State (raison d’Etat). This is a good, advanced introduction to Marxism and students should have already taken some basic introduction to the basic writings of Marx and Engels and 19th century German Idealism. We will be reviewing writings after the death of Marx himself, beginning with Engel’s Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1888), followed by key philosophers and theorists in Marxist and Late-Marxist Political Philosophy (e.g., Plekhanov, Korsch, Lenin, Stalin, Mattick, Horkheimer, and Althusser); the second half of the seminar will conclude with Foucault’s 1977-1978 lectures on “Security, Territory, Population” and a selection of current critical scholarship on Foucault’s theory of biopolitics.
Readings (in order):
2. PHI 400: Fundamental Problems of Marxism: Perpetual Peace
Syracuse University, Spring 2024; Charles University/Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Science, Prague, Fall 2024
War is the father of all and the king of all and has revealed that the ones are gods, and the others are humans, and has made the ones slaves and the others free.
—Attributed to Heraclitus (D64), Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies.
Seminar Description:
In this seminar we will be concerned with what I will call the three estates of peace: the state of temporary peace following the conclusion of war and the inevitable distribution of wealth and territories between victors and losers; the state of a final peace dreamed of by revolutions (but also by “speculative philosophers” who continue to play what Kant called “the great game of revolution”), and; finally, a state that might approximate what Kant calls the philosophers “sweet dream of peace,” which remains only an idea. However, as a practical problem of politics, the idea of a final peace has been historically determined by two absolutely opposing ends, creating an “antinomy” in the idea of perpetual peace: either the peace that is brought about by the genocide or forced subjugation of a historical “people, “or the peace enforced by the State or by an alliance of nation-states. Although the idea of perpetual peace is not usually associated with the tradition of Marxism, Marx and Engel’s appropriation of the revolutionary course of History from Hegel that leads to the complete overturning of capitalist society and the final establishment of a peaceful state of civil society when the state “withers away,” representing a modern utoppian ideal of perpetual peace. In last year’s seminar, we traced the origin of this idea in Plato’s “The Statesman,” concerning the return of a pastoral form of sovereignty. This year, we will explore the myth of a final peace established after the end of History by placing it in a dialectical relationship with the Kantian idea of perpetual peace from his 1795 treatise Towards Perpetual Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf).[1] Specifically, we will be examining the different ideal constitutions of sovereignty in the Western tradition of political philosophy (Hobbes and Spinoza), with either a civil society without a state-form of sovereignty, or historically, the “Universal and Homogenous State” proposed by Hegel and later on, Lenin and Stalin and; finally, what Kant refers to as a “cosmopolitical constitution of world government,” defined as a peaceful federation of free republics (foedus pacificum). The problem that will concern us is what Foucault called “the balance of Europe,” whether referring to the post-Westphalian Order or the post-WWII alliance of NATO today. The major question we will address is whether such a confederacy or alliance can be imagined without the existence of a major political enemy (as in the case of Russia today) and thus upon a principle of political peace (or security) that is premised on the continuation or the threat of war?
Assignments: Weekly “five-minute papers” in response to assigned readings and seminar discussion; final project presentation (via Zoom) on a current war or civil conflict employing the preliminary articles from Kant’s Zum ewigen Frieden to propose a plan for perpetual peace.[2] (Examples from student power point presentations at Syracuse University will be provided via Dropbox. Students should sign up for a Dropbox account to receive seminar materials and readings.)
Readings (in order)
Further References:
3. PHI 422/622: Fundamental Problems of Marxism: “The End of History”
Syracuse University, Spring 2025; Charles University, Czech Republic (anticipated fall 2025)
“Alexandre Kojève believed that ultimately history itself would vindicate its own rationality. That is, enough wagons would pull into town such that any reasonable person looking at the situation would agree that there had been only one journey and one destination.” –Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
Seminar Description
The above epigraph is taken from the last paragraph of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), a triumphalist narrative that was popular in the first decade of the global liberal order following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the democratization of Eastern European societies, a period that many experts believe ended with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, and the emergence of a new multi-lateral international order. Thus, I employ it as a leading topic of this spring’s seminar as a bookend of sorts, if only to mark the difference in tone between this decade and the one we currently inhabit. Although not necessarily focused on Fukuyama’s liberal version of “the End of History,” in this seminar we will study the philosophical sources of this theme in Plato, Hegel, Marx and Engels, the late Marxist philosopher Alexandre Kojève and in the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx (1993), written in response to Fukuyama’s epistle. Specifically, in this seminar we will focus on the opposition between a cyclical view of History that appears as early as Plato and is primarily drawn from mythic sources, and a “prophetic” or revolutionary version of History that is commonly associated with the philosophies of Hegel and Marx, but which also frequently appears in Kant’s later philosophy, particularly in the second part of the Conflict of the Faculties(1797), addressing the conflict between philosophers and 18th century practical politicians and European statesmen. Some of the readings will be drawn from the previous two seminars on “fundamental problems of Marxism” and discussed specifically in reference to this conflict between two kinds of knowledge that inform the idea of “the End of History.”
Readings (in order)
Assignments: Weekly “five-minute papers” in response to assigned readings and seminar discussion; final 10–11-page paper on selected reading and secondary scholarship.