Cadernos de Filosofia Alemã: Crítica e Modernidade
Cadernos de Filosofia Alemã: Crítica e Modernidade University of São Paulo, Brazil ISSN Printed: 1413-7860 ISSN Online: 2318-9800 Open-Access, Blind Review Periodic The journal Cadernos de Filosofia Alemã: Crítica e Modernidade, edited by the University of São Paulo, publishes articles, reviews, translations and interviews from national and international scholars in open access since 1996. Our thematic scope comprises not only German Philosophy, but, more generally, reflections concerning modernity, as understood from the theoretical framework provided by the heritage of critical philosophy. This journal was created by the group FiCeM - Filosofia Crítica e Modernidade (Critical Philosophy and Modernity), a group of scholars of several Brazilian universities, and our Editorial Board gathers scholars from universities in Latin America, United States and Europe. Currently, we publish articles, reviews and interviews in Portuguese, Spanish, French and English and translations to Portuguese - in volumes released at least every six months and in special Dossiers. The texts can be submitted at any time in our website (in case of doubt, contact us sending a message to filosofiaalema@usp.br).
Information and conceptions on the texts are complete responsibility of the authors. All the articles submitted before July 5th 2018 and those published after July 2021 are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND license – except those published between the aforementioned dates, which are under the CC BY-NC-SA license. The permission for the translation of the material published under the license CC BY-NC-ND by third parts can be obtained with the consent of the author. Open access policies - Diadorim Rules applied before July 5th 2018: Presenting a submission to our Editorial Board implies granting priority of publication for “Cadernos de filosofia alemã”, as well as transferring the copyright of texts (once published), which will be reproduced only with the manifest authorization of the editors. Authors keep the right to reuse the texts published in future editions of their work, without paying any fees to "Cadernos”. We will not grant the permission to re-edit or translate the texts for third parts without agreement of the author.
Copyright (c) 2025 Luiz Repa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
From the Rubble of the Marxian Work to the Debate: Thomas Marxhausen's Contribution to the Category of Fetishism
Translator’s presentation: ,,Die Theorie des Fetischismus im dritten Band des Kapitals”, published in volume 25 of the journal Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung, 1988. Translated by Leonardo de Deus and Guilherme Oliveira e Silva, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
Copyright (c) 2025 Leonardo de Deus, Guilherme Oliveira e Silva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
A Presentation to “Against a Law on the Constitutional Review of Reich Laws”
The article starts with an analysis of a bill concerning the constitutionality control of Reich laws provisions and argues against such a proposal. The proposal embodied a minority view under the Bismarckian Constitution but gained majority under the Weimar Constitution due to constitutional developments in favor of workers. In this context, the author advocates for parliamentary sovereignty over the judiciary and highlights reactionary tendencies in the exercise of judicial power, emphasizing fundamental rights as a target of dispute against workers, to the detriment of the democratic configuration forged by the German Revolution.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marina Slhessarenko Fraife Barreto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
An Assessment of the Debate on the Normative Foundation of Kant’s Philosophy of Right
This article presents an analysis of the contemporary debate concerning the normative foundation of Kant's philosophy of right. The fundamental question is how to reconcile moral obligation, which is based on the principle of the autonomy of the will understood as self-coercion, with the thesis that law is defined by the legitimacy of external coercion, namely coercion by others. Following the exposition of the principal theses of Guyer and Willaschek, two of the most prominent participants in the debate, the strengths and limitations of both positions are then elucidated.
Copyright (c) 2025 Joel T Klein https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Rawls and Kant: On the Primacy of Reason
Introduction to the translation: Korsgaard, C. M. (1995). Rawls and Kant: On the primacy of the practical. In Proceedings of the 8th International Kant Congress, Memphis 1995 (Vol. I, pp. 1665–1173). Translated by Lucas Petroni.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lucas Petroni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Habermas as a reader of Nietzsche: on the problem of the critique of knowledge
Written as an afterword to an anthology of Nietzsche’s writings on the theory of knowledge published in 1968, Habermas continues here what he began in Knowledge and Human Interests, released that same year. Highlighting the elements of Nietzschean thought representative of an unconventional theory of knowledge, such as a new deduction of the “categories”, by which the transcendental is naturalized and brought back to the structures of language, Habermas also shows how and why this critique of knowledge resulted in a doctrine of the perspectives of the affects, whose impermeability to reflection would have made Nietzsche the author of the last chapter in the prehistory of positivism.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ricardo Barbosa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Habermas, J. (1968). Zu Nietzsches Erkenntnistheorie. In F. Nietzsche, Erkenntnistheoretische Schriften (pp. 237-261). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated by Ricardo Barbosa, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ).
Copyright (c) 2025 Jürgen Habermas; Ricardo Barbosa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
A review of: Schelling, F. W. J. (2024). Da alma do mundo: uma hipótese da física superior para esclarecimento do organismo universal. (M. C. F. Gonçalves, Trad.; E. R. Marques, Rev.). Editora da Universidade de São Paulo. (Clássicos, 39).
Copyright (c) 2025 Gabriel Almeida Assumpção https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Hegel's critique of the good will and its connection with Jacobi's philosophy in Philosophy of Right
I demonstrate that the critique of goodness of will in the Philosophy of Right is linked to the critique of the work of Friedrich Jacobi, who was the main representative of this figure according to Hegel. Hegel criticizes “goodness of will” as a form of moral subjectivity that places itself above norms, arbitrarily determining what good actions are. The analysis establishes links between Hegel's critique and Jacobi's thought: first, by examining the definition of the “goodness of will”; second, by analysing the reference to the "conscience" in the Phenomenology of Spirit; and, finally, by indicating the use of terms that coincide with those of Jacobi in An Fichte.
Copyright (c) 2025 Carlos Víctor Alfaro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
The Philosophical Life in Question: Between Kant and Nietzsche
The aim of this article is to approach Nietzsche’s philosophy through the lens of what Kant calls the sensus communnis — a faculty of judgment which, in its reflection, takes into account everyone else’s way of representing. To achieve this goal, I first present some aspects of the relationship between philosophy and health in Kant’s and Nietzsche’s thoughts, and then I analyze Kant’s characterization of “unreason” as the absence or loss of the sensus communis. After this, I try to suggest how Nietzsche’s approach to the problem of health is decisive for the uniqueness of his philosophical experience.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rodrigo de Oliveira Figueiredo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Luiz Repa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Eckart Förster e a busca por uma filosofia goetheana
Apresentação à tradução de Goethe como filósofo, de Eckart Förster, por Renato Costa Leandro
Copyright (c) 2024 Renato Costa Leandro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Presentation to the translation "The Social Question" in French-German cultural exchange: Gans, Marx and the reception of Saint-Simon, by Myriam Bienenstock. Translated by Hernandez Vivan Eichenberger
Copyright (c) 2024 Hernandez Vivan Eichenberger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Critical Theory and Latin American Decolonial Theory: Congruences and Incongruences from the Perspective of Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialectics
Provoked to reflect on the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno's Critical Theory today, this paper proposes an approach to Latin American Decolonial Theory. Although Adorno did not specifically address this topic, his thought is recognized as fruitful for emphasizing the ambiguities of historical processes in European modernity and their relationship with social domination. We draw on the writings of Aníbal Quijano, Santiago Castro-Gómez Walter Mignolo and Enrique Dussel to outline the central premises of decoloniality and explore their convergences with Adorno's Critical Theory, not only concerning a certain violence of the concept but also regarding the need to recognize the non-identical, fundamental themes in the Negative Dialectics (1966). The author proposes a decolonial reading of negative dialectics, emphasizing its sense of diversity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mariana Fidelis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Benjamin and Atget: the “Rebirth” of Photography at the Beginning of the 20th Century
The philosophy of Walter Benjamin and the photography of Eugène Atget establish a significant relationship, precisely because they are at the intersection of art and history. Benjamin thematized the nature of the modern aesthetic experience; Atget captured urban scenes, which striking characteristic was the absence of the human figure. This approach inspired Benjamin, who recognized in Atget’s revolutionary potential. Thus, it is above all on this potential that this article will seek to dwell, since we assume that their convergent views on visual perception and the preservation of the past through photography enable a new perspective for understanding contemporaneity.
Copyright (c) 2025 João Pedro Azevedo Lima https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Against a Bill on the Judicial Review of Reich Laws
The text was originally published under the title Gegen ein Gesetz zur Nachprüfung der Verfassungsmäßigkeit von Reichsgesetzen in the journal Die Gesellschaft, vol. 6, 1929. Translation by Marina Slhessarenko Fraife Barreto, Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH-USP).
Copyright (c) 2025 Franz Neumann; Marina Slhessarenko Fraife Barreto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Obstacles and possibilities: the place of power in Seyla Benhabib’s narrative model of self
This article proposes an evaluation of the validity of Amy Allen's critique of the “rationalist residue” of Seyla Benhabib's narrative self in the context of the “problem of the subject” as presented in her work The Politics of Our Selves (2008). We propose an interpretative line that aims to offer an approach to the obstacles and possibilities of incorporating power into the narrative model of the self that questions the validity of the assumption of a rationalist core remaining in the self.
Copyright (c) 2025 Graziella Mazzei https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Slavery and the making of national ideological life
There is a fundamental mistake that runs through the works of some of the most important authors of Brazilian critical theory, from Caio Prado Jr. to Paulo Arantes, including Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco and Roberto Schwarz: by excluding the relations of oppression and resistance inherent to slave domination from their conceptions about the making of Brazilian ideological life, these authors were unable to understand the dynamics of nineteenth-century Brazilian social authoritarianism, neither in its formal aspects nor in its content. Contrasting their elaborations with the findings of the Brazilian historiography of slavery produced in the last forty years, this article proceeds to review concepts and formulate new interpretative hypotheses about the making of national ideological life.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dario de Negreiros https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
The implosion of authoritarianism and the construction of democratic socialism: Kirchheimer's opposition to Schmitt under Weimar
This article proposes a reconstruction of the theoretical aspects of Otto Kirchheimer's opposition to Carl Schmitt, aiming to outline the way in which his confrontation with ascending authoritarianism, as well as his desire for social and economic transformation, distances him from Schmittian positions. It is argued that currents in literature that bring authors too close together end up neglecting the Marxist influence of Kirchheimer's analyses, especially in the critique of liberalism. To this end, the fundamental moment and thematic focus of this work are the texts written about and during the Weimar Constitution.
Copyright (c) 2025 Henrique Pereira de Queiroz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Rawls and Kant: On the Primacy of the Practical
Translation: Korsgaard, C. M. (1995). Rawls and Kant: On the primacy of the practical. In Proceedings of the 8th International Kant Congress, Memphis 1995 (Vol. I, pp. 1665–1173). Translated by Lucas Petroni.
Copyright (c) 2025 Christine Korsgaard; Lucas Petroni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
The "Social Question" in the french-german cultural exchange: Gans, Marx and the reception of Saint-Simon
The article reconstructs the reception of Sansimonism in Germany. To this end, it shows how Hegelianism and Sansimonism were initially confused. Carové and Gans, however, immediately sought to mark the differences between the two. In Gans' case, however, the problem of the plebs, present within Hegel's thought, led him to positively re-evaluate Sansimonism and outline an autonomous understanding of the problem of poverty. Gans' reading is characterized in contrast to Marx's.
Copyright (c) 2024 Myriam Bienenstock; Hernandez Vivan Eichenberger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
In this article, I analyze Habermas's work through the lens of the problem of neoconservatism. First, I demonstrate that this was one of the reasons for abandoning the critical theory of knowledge and recovering the critical theory of reason in Theory of communicative action. Second, I present the diagnosis concerning the conjunction between neoconservatism and neoliberalism in The new obscurity and explain why it led to the development of a theory of justice in Between facts and norms. Based on this internal perspective of Habermas's work, I reconstruct his theory of neoconservatism and argue that it provides a basis for understanding current far right movements, explaining their ability to shield citizens from learning from others' experiences and their own mistakes, as well as the distinction between these movements and historical fascism. Finally, I acknowledge the limitations of Habermas's theory of neoconservatism for understanding the current far right.
Copyright (c) 2025 Felipe Moralles e Moraes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Kant's Theodicy in Toward Perpetual Peace
The problem of theodicy has a central function in the systematics of Kant's philosophy, since its essential aspect, namely, the problem of the “contrariety of ends” is at the core of the problem of the highest good. If this is correct, it can be said that theodicy directly and indirectly permeates all levels of Kantian thought. My purpose in this paper is to present, in accordance with this hypothesis, an attempt to interpret Kant's philosophy of history from the point of view of theodicy. I try to show how the first two types of contradiction of theodicy, concerning physical evil and moral evil, can be considered as "means" through which "nature" or, in Kant's words, "providence" promotes both the cultural progress of humanity and the progress of its legal-political institutions. As a result of my analysis, I suggest that the solution to the first two levels of contradiction in theodicy, addressed within the scope of a philosophy of history, opens the way for the solution to the third level within the scope of the philosophy of religion.
Copyright (c) 2025 Bruno Cunha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Quando longe vai a vida habitante dos homens...
Resenha de Agamben, G. (2022). A loucura de Hölderlin - crônica de uma vida habitante 1806-1843. Tradução de Wander Melo Miranda. Belo Horizonte: Editora Âyiné.
Copyright (c) 2024 João Evangelista Fernandes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Heidegger’s Alétheia: a Conflictual and Tragic Notion of Truth
The objective of this work is to analyze what type of conflict is involved in the Greek’s truth, alétheia, appropriated by Heidegger, and which has in its etymology the opposition between veiling and unveiling. To do this, we use a historical-philosophical approach, as well as an analysis of the Heideggerian interpretation of alétheia contained in the Parmenides. Also we differentiate between an aletheic conflict and a Hegelian dialectical conflict. We sustain that the conflict involved in Heidegger's alétheia can be read as a tragic conflict, close to its Greek origin, which differentiates it from the contradiction belonging to modern metaphysics.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marina Coelho https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Aesthetics after Adorno: between progress and autonomy
This article seeks to critically evaluate the reception of Theodor Adorno's aesthetics, considering two fundamental concepts: autonomy and progress. We will analyze how Adorno's work was associated with a one-sided perspective of modernism, insofar as his conception of autonomous art was supposedly based on technical progress. Our hypothesis is that this reception lost sight of the critique of progress sustained by Adorno's aesthetics. We therefore propose a different reading, recovering Adorno's critique of progress in order to articulate a notion of the autonomy of art that can contribute to recent debates on contemporary art.
Copyright (c) 2025 Raquel Patriota https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Franz Neumann’s critical model: the continuity among three diagnoses from the Republic to national socialism
Commentators on Franz Neumann's work typically identify three phases in his production: the writings of the Republic, of National Socialism, and of the post-war period. The writings of the first phase are often considered smaller or more militant, while the later ones are seen as more theoretical and robust. Moreover, they are perceived as separated by significant ruptures, particularly due to the rise of National Socialism. In this article, I challenge these propositions: I reconstruct three time diagnoses made by the author between 1929 and 1944 andhighlight one important line of continuity among them. The relationship established by fundamental rights and democracy illustrates a theoretical and thematic continuity in Neumann’s work, even though it is fragmentary. I develop this relationship and point out two concrete examples of these continuities in Neumann’s thought before and after the fall of the Republic.