David Kretz | University of Chicago (original) (raw)
Drafts by David Kretz
This essay inquires into different responses to the end of a world. Against the wide-spread idea ... more This essay inquires into different responses to the end of a world. Against the wide-spread idea that what is needed at the end of a world is a great poet, broadly conceived as a creator of world, it looks to the translator as an alternative and develops a concept of translational action as a response to the end of a world.
French MA thesis, submitted at ENS, Paris in spring 2018.
Supervisors: Marc Crépon, Marc de Launay.
What may we hope for if our worlds come to an end? Some philosophers (e.g. Heidegger, Rorty) have... more What may we hope for if our worlds come to an end? Some philosophers (e.g. Heidegger, Rorty) have argued: a great poet, broadly understood as creator of concepts and worlds. This paper proposes an alternative which I call translational action. I begin by outlining the particular kind of world-crisis that motivates my work and offer a contrast between two kinds of responses to this type of crisis, which I associate with poetic creation and translation respectively. First, I work out differences and similarities between these two in their ordinary, literary-aesthetic sense (I). Building on George Steiner's phenomenology of translation, I then propose an ‘operationalization’ of the concept of translation for social theory (II). Thirdly, I read three ethnographic case studies through the lenses of these concepts—poetic creation and translational action—to show their disclosive powers (III). Two examples are taken from the Amazonas region (Kalapalo and Jivaroans) and one from the Northern American Great Plaines (Crow).
Edited volumes, Translations by David Kretz
Revue Philosophie, 2024
French translation of Adorno's 1932 summer term seminar on Benjamin's Trauerspielbuch. (French ti... more French translation of Adorno's 1932 summer term seminar on Benjamin's Trauerspielbuch. (French title: "Séminaire d’été 1932 sur L’Origine du drame baroque allemand de Walter Benjamin. Comptes rendus").
Co-translated with, and preface by, Jean Tain.
Philosophie 2024/1 (N° 160). Éditions de minuit.
Journal for the History of Modern Theologie / Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschicht, 2022
For the first time, this edition presents Leo Strauss’s Hillel House lecture series on “Jerusalem... more For the first time, this edition presents Leo Strauss’s Hillel House lecture series on “Jerusalem and Athens.” The three lectures, delivered in the fall of 1950, investigate the agreement, disagreement, and conflict between the biblical and the philosophic “ways of life”: “Philosophy in the full sense is [...] incompatible with the biblical way of life. Philosophy and the Bible are the alternatives or the antagonists in the drama of the human soul. Each of the two antagonists claims to know the truth, namely, the decisive truths, the truths regarding the right way of life. But there can be only one truth, and, hence, conflict is inevitable.”
This volume is a collection of European students’ voices on their liberal education. It is not a ... more This volume is a collection of European students’ voices on their liberal education. It is not a comparative, scholarly study of student experience in liberal education programmes, although it might serve as a first step towards such an inquiry. Rather, it invites its readers to explore the nature, promises, and pitfalls of liberal education in Europe, and to initiate into the diversity of institutional and curricular arrangements, as they are perceived by those who took part in them.
Researchers and journalists that are already covering liberal education will hopefully find in students’ insider perspectives valuable and original contributions to their field of interest. Their accounts might also offer inspiration and caveats to those administrators, faculty, and sponsors currently running liberal education initiatives or considering doing so in the future. Last but not least, prospective liberal arts students will get a better idea of what to expect, current ones will find that others perhaps share their joys and struggles, and former ones can remember a formative phase in their lives.
►►http://liberal-arts.eu/ebook/◄◄
Papers by David Kretz
Meeting Balibar: A Discussion on Equaliberty and Differences, ed. Soraya Nour Sckell, 2023
A response to Étienne Balibar's 2018 Mark Sachs Lecture "Ontological difference, anthropological ... more A response to Étienne Balibar's 2018 Mark Sachs Lecture "Ontological difference, anthropological difference, and equal liberty"
(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ejop.12512) delivered at a symposium hosted by NOVA School of Law in Lisbon in 2020.
Handbuch Richard Rorty, 2022
Handbuch Richard Rorty (2022) Entry on Rorty's opus magnum for the first German Rorty handbook (... more Handbuch Richard Rorty (2022)
Entry on Rorty's opus magnum for the first German Rorty handbook (ed. Martin Müller, Springer Verlag). Reads the book as the coming-of-age novel (Bildungsroman) of the liberal ironist; thus, the focus is on how Rorty combines philosophical and literary strategies in his writing.
German abstract: Richard Rortys Hauptwerk Kontingenz, Ironie und Solidarität (1989) wird inhaltlich vorgestellt, biographisch kontextualisiert und als Bildungsroman der liberalen Ironikerin neu gelesen. Das Buch markiert Rortys Bruch mit der theoretischen analytischen Philosophie und eine Wende hin zu praktischer und kontinentaler Philosophie, sowie zur Literatur. Diese Wende will Rorty mit dem Werk auch auf kultureller Ebene und im Leben seiner LeserInnen anstoßen. Spezielles Augenmerk gilt hier der Weise auf die Rorty zu diesem Zweck philosophisch-argumentative und literarisch-beschreibende Strategien verschränkt. Durch den Fokus auf die literarische Form des Buches wird gezeigt, wie es seine eigenen Schlüsseldichotomien (Philosophie-Literatur, privat-öffentlich) performativ und pragmatisch, das heißt nicht-metaphysisch überwindet.
Handbuch Richard Rorty, 2022
German entry for the Richard Rorty handbook (ed. Martin Müller, Springer 2022) on Vol. II of Rort... more German entry for the Richard Rorty handbook (ed. Martin Müller, Springer 2022) on Vol. II of Rorty's collected essays. Discusses primarily Rorty on Heidegger, Derrida, Freud, MacIntyre, Unger, and Castoriadis.
German abstract: "Der Artikel präsentiert und kontextualisiert Rortys Essays on Heidegger and Others, in denen er die Postmoderne (besonders Heidegger, Derrida und de Man) mit dem Pragmatismus in Dialog setzt, sowie zum ethisch-politischen Denken Freuds, MacIntyres, Ungers und Castoriadis' Stellung nimmt."
A comparative, historical study of three German liberal education initatives, the financial and i... more A comparative, historical study of three German liberal education initatives, the financial and institutional crises they faced, and how they survived them.
Published in The University as a Critical institution? Ed. R. Deem & H. Eggins. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017.
We revisit Aristophanes’ charge against Socratic education in the Clouds and, placing that charge... more We revisit Aristophanes’ charge against Socratic education in the Clouds and, placing that charge in its democratic context, propose that the play is equally critical of Socratic education as it is of democracy’s narrowly utilitarian approach to learning embodied in the comic protagonist Strepsiades. The clash between the two, we claim, is the play’s main target. In the second part, we suggest that Aristophanes’ challenge is still with us and merits to be taken seriously by defenders of liberal education today. Discussing one institutional response to that challenge, we argue that if it is to be useful for modern democracy liberal education needs to address the heterogeneity of values, and that a core-text based curriculum is uniquely fit to do so.
A brief and imaginative outline for a new interpretive strategy towards the philosophy of Friedri... more A brief and imaginative outline for a new interpretive strategy towards the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. First, I offer a close reading of Nietzsche’s thoughts on ‘character’, arguing against 'rational reconstructivists' and 'eclectic pragmatists' that the literary character can serve as a model for synthesizing a whole out of Nietzsche’s thought, albeit a dynamic and open-ended one (1). Secondly, following Duncan Large’s speculation, and taking my cues from Nietzsche’s own writing, etymology, and the phenomenology of translation, I argue that translation is the key method by with such a synthesis could proceed (2). Lastly, I offer an axiological consideration, why such an interpretative strategy expresses precisely those values that are appropriate when dealing philosophically with Nietzsche, and conclude with a discussion of one value in question, the value of fidelity (3).
Romanian Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 2014
Book Reviews by David Kretz
International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2022
Axel Honneth's Recognition tells a history of the concept of recognition along national lines. Th... more Axel Honneth's Recognition tells a history of the concept of recognition along national lines. This response argues that a focus on transnational cross-pollination would be preferable on the grounds of historical accuracy, philosophical fecundity, and political cosmopolitanism. It would recognize its existent protagonists as the good Europeans they actually were and bring in others now relegated to the margins. It would lay the groundwork for a creative integration of national traditions, beyond the subsumption of French and British under German models. It would facilitate a theoretical dialogue with traditions beyond the Old Continent. I suggest that Hobbes could be a starting point for such a historical narrative, pointing to the importance of social recognition for his political theory (via Oakeshott), but also to traces of an incipient notion of moral-political recognition closer to the post-Kantian paradigm that Honneth champions.
Prof. Honneth's response should be available here soon:
https://brill.com/view/journals/hcm/hcm-overview.xml?language=en
Pragmata, 2019
Review, in French, of Steven A. Miller's book on the moral philosophy of Josiah Royce, Wilfried S... more Review, in French, of Steven A. Miller's book on the moral philosophy of Josiah Royce, Wilfried Sellars, and Richard Rorty for Pragmata, a French journal of pragmatist philosophy.
Book review of A. MacIntyre's Ethics in the Conflicts of Moderniy—An Essay on Desire, Practical R... more Book review of A. MacIntyre's Ethics in the Conflicts of Moderniy—An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016). Appeared in Raisons Politiques (2018)
Book review of Corporatism and Fascism, ed. Antonio Costa Pinto.
Book review of Richard J. Bernstein's Ironic Life (2016) in Kronos Quarterly.
Other work by David Kretz
![Research paper thumbnail of Dobre praktyki w obsadzaniu stanowisk akademickich na zagranicznych uczelniach [Good practices in faculty hiring: international insights]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/45434653/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Artykuł opisuje sposób zatrudniania naukowców w wybranych krajach europejskich i USA. Jego celem ... more Artykuł opisuje sposób zatrudniania naukowców w wybranych krajach europejskich i USA. Jego celem jest przedstawienie rozwiązań, które mogłyby stanowić podstawę dyskusji o reformie zatrudniania w szkołach wyższych w Polsce. Jak pokazują badania, zamknięte, niejawne i bazujące na mikropolityce procedury zatrudniania kadry naukowej przekładają się (poprzez chów wsobny) na niską jakość i liczbę prowadzonych badań, osłabiając międzynarodową konkurencyjność uczelni. Najsilniejsze kultury badawcze korzystają z procedur rekrutacyjnych, które są otwarte, przejrzyste i oparte na kryteriach merytorycznych. Te trzy cechy – nie zawsze występujące w równym stopniu – stanowią busolę, którą kierowano się w przygotowaniu niniejszego artykułu. Autorzy połączyli w nim wnioski z badań naukowych, analiz Komisji Europejskiej (na potrzeby projektu Euraxess) z osobistym doświadczeniem. Tekst omawia praktyki stosowane w czterech krajach. Poszczególne części zawierają informacje o systemie szkolnictwa wyższego w danym kraju, opis typowej procedury rekrutacyjnej, następnie wyszczególnione są godne podkreślenia dobre praktyki, a na końcu następuje krótkie podsumowanie. W końcowej części tekstu zostały krótko zasygnalizowane przykłady z innych krajów europejskich. Poprzedzają one podsumowanie zawierające wnioski dla Polski.
This essay inquires into different responses to the end of a world. Against the wide-spread idea ... more This essay inquires into different responses to the end of a world. Against the wide-spread idea that what is needed at the end of a world is a great poet, broadly conceived as a creator of world, it looks to the translator as an alternative and develops a concept of translational action as a response to the end of a world.
French MA thesis, submitted at ENS, Paris in spring 2018.
Supervisors: Marc Crépon, Marc de Launay.
What may we hope for if our worlds come to an end? Some philosophers (e.g. Heidegger, Rorty) have... more What may we hope for if our worlds come to an end? Some philosophers (e.g. Heidegger, Rorty) have argued: a great poet, broadly understood as creator of concepts and worlds. This paper proposes an alternative which I call translational action. I begin by outlining the particular kind of world-crisis that motivates my work and offer a contrast between two kinds of responses to this type of crisis, which I associate with poetic creation and translation respectively. First, I work out differences and similarities between these two in their ordinary, literary-aesthetic sense (I). Building on George Steiner's phenomenology of translation, I then propose an ‘operationalization’ of the concept of translation for social theory (II). Thirdly, I read three ethnographic case studies through the lenses of these concepts—poetic creation and translational action—to show their disclosive powers (III). Two examples are taken from the Amazonas region (Kalapalo and Jivaroans) and one from the Northern American Great Plaines (Crow).
Revue Philosophie, 2024
French translation of Adorno's 1932 summer term seminar on Benjamin's Trauerspielbuch. (French ti... more French translation of Adorno's 1932 summer term seminar on Benjamin's Trauerspielbuch. (French title: "Séminaire d’été 1932 sur L’Origine du drame baroque allemand de Walter Benjamin. Comptes rendus").
Co-translated with, and preface by, Jean Tain.
Philosophie 2024/1 (N° 160). Éditions de minuit.
Journal for the History of Modern Theologie / Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschicht, 2022
For the first time, this edition presents Leo Strauss’s Hillel House lecture series on “Jerusalem... more For the first time, this edition presents Leo Strauss’s Hillel House lecture series on “Jerusalem and Athens.” The three lectures, delivered in the fall of 1950, investigate the agreement, disagreement, and conflict between the biblical and the philosophic “ways of life”: “Philosophy in the full sense is [...] incompatible with the biblical way of life. Philosophy and the Bible are the alternatives or the antagonists in the drama of the human soul. Each of the two antagonists claims to know the truth, namely, the decisive truths, the truths regarding the right way of life. But there can be only one truth, and, hence, conflict is inevitable.”
This volume is a collection of European students’ voices on their liberal education. It is not a ... more This volume is a collection of European students’ voices on their liberal education. It is not a comparative, scholarly study of student experience in liberal education programmes, although it might serve as a first step towards such an inquiry. Rather, it invites its readers to explore the nature, promises, and pitfalls of liberal education in Europe, and to initiate into the diversity of institutional and curricular arrangements, as they are perceived by those who took part in them.
Researchers and journalists that are already covering liberal education will hopefully find in students’ insider perspectives valuable and original contributions to their field of interest. Their accounts might also offer inspiration and caveats to those administrators, faculty, and sponsors currently running liberal education initiatives or considering doing so in the future. Last but not least, prospective liberal arts students will get a better idea of what to expect, current ones will find that others perhaps share their joys and struggles, and former ones can remember a formative phase in their lives.
►►http://liberal-arts.eu/ebook/◄◄
Meeting Balibar: A Discussion on Equaliberty and Differences, ed. Soraya Nour Sckell, 2023
A response to Étienne Balibar's 2018 Mark Sachs Lecture "Ontological difference, anthropological ... more A response to Étienne Balibar's 2018 Mark Sachs Lecture "Ontological difference, anthropological difference, and equal liberty"
(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ejop.12512) delivered at a symposium hosted by NOVA School of Law in Lisbon in 2020.
Handbuch Richard Rorty, 2022
Handbuch Richard Rorty (2022) Entry on Rorty's opus magnum for the first German Rorty handbook (... more Handbuch Richard Rorty (2022)
Entry on Rorty's opus magnum for the first German Rorty handbook (ed. Martin Müller, Springer Verlag). Reads the book as the coming-of-age novel (Bildungsroman) of the liberal ironist; thus, the focus is on how Rorty combines philosophical and literary strategies in his writing.
German abstract: Richard Rortys Hauptwerk Kontingenz, Ironie und Solidarität (1989) wird inhaltlich vorgestellt, biographisch kontextualisiert und als Bildungsroman der liberalen Ironikerin neu gelesen. Das Buch markiert Rortys Bruch mit der theoretischen analytischen Philosophie und eine Wende hin zu praktischer und kontinentaler Philosophie, sowie zur Literatur. Diese Wende will Rorty mit dem Werk auch auf kultureller Ebene und im Leben seiner LeserInnen anstoßen. Spezielles Augenmerk gilt hier der Weise auf die Rorty zu diesem Zweck philosophisch-argumentative und literarisch-beschreibende Strategien verschränkt. Durch den Fokus auf die literarische Form des Buches wird gezeigt, wie es seine eigenen Schlüsseldichotomien (Philosophie-Literatur, privat-öffentlich) performativ und pragmatisch, das heißt nicht-metaphysisch überwindet.
Handbuch Richard Rorty, 2022
German entry for the Richard Rorty handbook (ed. Martin Müller, Springer 2022) on Vol. II of Rort... more German entry for the Richard Rorty handbook (ed. Martin Müller, Springer 2022) on Vol. II of Rorty's collected essays. Discusses primarily Rorty on Heidegger, Derrida, Freud, MacIntyre, Unger, and Castoriadis.
German abstract: "Der Artikel präsentiert und kontextualisiert Rortys Essays on Heidegger and Others, in denen er die Postmoderne (besonders Heidegger, Derrida und de Man) mit dem Pragmatismus in Dialog setzt, sowie zum ethisch-politischen Denken Freuds, MacIntyres, Ungers und Castoriadis' Stellung nimmt."
A comparative, historical study of three German liberal education initatives, the financial and i... more A comparative, historical study of three German liberal education initatives, the financial and institutional crises they faced, and how they survived them.
Published in The University as a Critical institution? Ed. R. Deem & H. Eggins. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017.
We revisit Aristophanes’ charge against Socratic education in the Clouds and, placing that charge... more We revisit Aristophanes’ charge against Socratic education in the Clouds and, placing that charge in its democratic context, propose that the play is equally critical of Socratic education as it is of democracy’s narrowly utilitarian approach to learning embodied in the comic protagonist Strepsiades. The clash between the two, we claim, is the play’s main target. In the second part, we suggest that Aristophanes’ challenge is still with us and merits to be taken seriously by defenders of liberal education today. Discussing one institutional response to that challenge, we argue that if it is to be useful for modern democracy liberal education needs to address the heterogeneity of values, and that a core-text based curriculum is uniquely fit to do so.
A brief and imaginative outline for a new interpretive strategy towards the philosophy of Friedri... more A brief and imaginative outline for a new interpretive strategy towards the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. First, I offer a close reading of Nietzsche’s thoughts on ‘character’, arguing against 'rational reconstructivists' and 'eclectic pragmatists' that the literary character can serve as a model for synthesizing a whole out of Nietzsche’s thought, albeit a dynamic and open-ended one (1). Secondly, following Duncan Large’s speculation, and taking my cues from Nietzsche’s own writing, etymology, and the phenomenology of translation, I argue that translation is the key method by with such a synthesis could proceed (2). Lastly, I offer an axiological consideration, why such an interpretative strategy expresses precisely those values that are appropriate when dealing philosophically with Nietzsche, and conclude with a discussion of one value in question, the value of fidelity (3).
Romanian Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 2014
International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2022
Axel Honneth's Recognition tells a history of the concept of recognition along national lines. Th... more Axel Honneth's Recognition tells a history of the concept of recognition along national lines. This response argues that a focus on transnational cross-pollination would be preferable on the grounds of historical accuracy, philosophical fecundity, and political cosmopolitanism. It would recognize its existent protagonists as the good Europeans they actually were and bring in others now relegated to the margins. It would lay the groundwork for a creative integration of national traditions, beyond the subsumption of French and British under German models. It would facilitate a theoretical dialogue with traditions beyond the Old Continent. I suggest that Hobbes could be a starting point for such a historical narrative, pointing to the importance of social recognition for his political theory (via Oakeshott), but also to traces of an incipient notion of moral-political recognition closer to the post-Kantian paradigm that Honneth champions.
Prof. Honneth's response should be available here soon:
https://brill.com/view/journals/hcm/hcm-overview.xml?language=en
Pragmata, 2019
Review, in French, of Steven A. Miller's book on the moral philosophy of Josiah Royce, Wilfried S... more Review, in French, of Steven A. Miller's book on the moral philosophy of Josiah Royce, Wilfried Sellars, and Richard Rorty for Pragmata, a French journal of pragmatist philosophy.
Book review of A. MacIntyre's Ethics in the Conflicts of Moderniy—An Essay on Desire, Practical R... more Book review of A. MacIntyre's Ethics in the Conflicts of Moderniy—An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016). Appeared in Raisons Politiques (2018)
Book review of Corporatism and Fascism, ed. Antonio Costa Pinto.
Book review of Richard J. Bernstein's Ironic Life (2016) in Kronos Quarterly.
Artykuł opisuje sposób zatrudniania naukowców w wybranych krajach europejskich i USA. Jego celem ... more Artykuł opisuje sposób zatrudniania naukowców w wybranych krajach europejskich i USA. Jego celem jest przedstawienie rozwiązań, które mogłyby stanowić podstawę dyskusji o reformie zatrudniania w szkołach wyższych w Polsce. Jak pokazują badania, zamknięte, niejawne i bazujące na mikropolityce procedury zatrudniania kadry naukowej przekładają się (poprzez chów wsobny) na niską jakość i liczbę prowadzonych badań, osłabiając międzynarodową konkurencyjność uczelni. Najsilniejsze kultury badawcze korzystają z procedur rekrutacyjnych, które są otwarte, przejrzyste i oparte na kryteriach merytorycznych. Te trzy cechy – nie zawsze występujące w równym stopniu – stanowią busolę, którą kierowano się w przygotowaniu niniejszego artykułu. Autorzy połączyli w nim wnioski z badań naukowych, analiz Komisji Europejskiej (na potrzeby projektu Euraxess) z osobistym doświadczeniem. Tekst omawia praktyki stosowane w czterech krajach. Poszczególne części zawierają informacje o systemie szkolnictwa wyższego w danym kraju, opis typowej procedury rekrutacyjnej, następnie wyszczególnione są godne podkreślenia dobre praktyki, a na końcu następuje krótkie podsumowanie. W końcowej części tekstu zostały krótko zasygnalizowane przykłady z innych krajów europejskich. Poprzedzają one podsumowanie zawierające wnioski dla Polski.