Reason is the certainty of consciousness of being all of reality. –Hegel
Professor Sebastian Rödl will be visiting Ohio State from September 11-14. He will give a public lecture in the Mortar Board Room 202 of the Thompson Library on Wednesday, September 12 at 4pm, entitled “Nature and the Good.” On Thursday, September 13 from 4-5:30pm he will conduct a workshop on Frege and the Force/Content distinction in the Philosophy Department, University Hall room 347, and another lecture entitle “Truth at a Context” on Friday from 3-4pm also in UH 347, followed by an hour of questions and discussions from 4-5pm.
Abstracts of the lectures and links to a reading for the workshop can be found below.
Sebastian Rödl is one of the most important figures in contemporary philosophy and is a leading expert on German idealism (notably Kant and Hegel), Aristotle, and very much engaged in contemporary philosophical debate on issues of consciousness, epistemology, speech act theory and formal semantics. His latest book Self-Consciousness and Objectivity, as Berislav Marusic of Brandeis puts it, “challenges central doctrines in semantics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, providing a new perspective on entrenched lines of thought in contemporary philosophy.”
Self-Consciousness and Objectivity undermines a foundational dogma of contemporary philosophy: that knowledge, in order to be objective, must be knowledge of something that is as it is, independent of being known to be so. Sebastian Rödl revives the thought–as ancient as philosophy but largely forgotten today–that knowledge, precisely on account of being objective, is self-knowledge: knowledge knowing itself.
A helpful review and summary of the book can be found here.
Self-consciousness and Objectivity will also be the subject of a three-day workshop at the University of Chicago October 5-7.
This book was composed partly over 2016-2017 when Prof. Rödl was invited to teach a year-long seminar on Absolute Idealism (Kant and Hegel) in the Philosophy Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Rödl’s ground-breaking work shows the importance of Hegel’s Logic to issues in epistemology, metaphysics, linguistics, notably semantics, philosophy of language, and speech act theory–to the whole of philosophy. His publications are listed here:
He is University Professor at the University of Leipzig and senior faculty at the Leipzig Institute on Analytic Philosophy & German idealism:
Rödl’s visit is sponsored by the Humanities Institute, the Departments of Philosophy, Germanic Languages and Literatures, English, French & Italian, and Comparative Studies.
Nature and The Good
Public lecture in the Mortar Board Room 202 of the Thompson Library on Wednesday, September 12 at 4pm
It has been debated whether practical reasoning concludes in a state of mind – a judgment, an intention – or whether in concludes in an action. The debate has failed to recognize the form and the significance of its question. First, the form: the question is misconstrued as it is thought to address a natural psychic power, found in human beings and perhaps other animals as well, and to be answered by the study of this natural reality. Rather, the question asks for an exposition of the understanding of its conclusion that is internal to practical reasoning. When it is so understood, the answer is clear: the conclusion of practical reasoning is an action. Second, the significance: the significance of this answer to the question resides in its being an understanding of nature: in it, nature is understood to be governed by the good as the supreme principle of all reality. As the understanding in question is internal to practical reasoning, practical reasoning is ethical knowledge of nature.
Workshop on Frege and the Force/Content distinction at 4pm on Thursday, September 13, in the Philosophy Department, University Hall room 347
A suggested reading in preparation for the workshop can be found here.
Truth at a Context
Friday, September 14 from 3-4pm in University Hall 347, followed by an hour of questions and discussion from 4-5pm.
It is customary to represent contents of acts of speech and thought in terms of their truth at a context: what is thought or said resides in what it is for it to be true, not simpliciter, but at a context. A context may provide values of all manner of parameters. It is traditional to take it to determine a world, a time, a speaker. So the content of an assertion or a judgment is to reside in what it is for it to be true relative to a world, a time, a speaker. Recently, there has been a lively discussion of the question whether we may add to the familiar parameters further ones, such as standards of taste or states of information. The concern of the present essay are not these extensions. They suggest themselves only insofar as what they extend is taken to be sound. The present essay argues that it is not: the nature of linguistic meaning, the nature of the content of thought, is obscured by the conception of it in terms of a relative concept of truth. For, a conception of content in terms of relative truth is incapable of capturing the comprehension of her speech that guides her who speaks, and the comprehension of her thought by her who thinks.