Dmitri Nikulin

Aufenthalt

Oktober 2009; Mai‒Juli 2012, August 2015‒Januar 2016, August‒Oktober 2019

Forschungsthema

»Responsibility and Hope«

Projektbeschreibung

After the publication of Hans Jonas' Das Prinzip Verantwortung forty years ago, the principle of responsibility has become a key concept in moral and political debates. Yet the unconditional responsibility for the possibility of the existence of future generations – not only of humans, but also of other living beings – is invariably accompanied by the ›heuristics of fear‹, which presupposes imagining the worst-case scenario and a pronouncedly bleak future. The dystopian principle of responsibility was introduced as a response to Bloch's Das Prinzip Hoffnung, which envisions the possibility of a utopian future for humanity. The proposed project will discuss these two principles and will argue that they are not mutually exclusive, so that, while still preserving the imperative of responsibility, one can maintain a utopian ideal as a regulative idea for moral and political action.

Veröffentlichungen (Auswahl)

• Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019.
• Memory. A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015.
• Comedy. Seriously, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2014.
• Metaphysik und Ethik. Theoretische und praktische Philosophie in Antike und Neuzeit, München: C. H. Beck 1996.
• Matter, Imagination, and Geometry. Ontology, Natural Philosophy, and Mathematics in Plotinus, Proclus, and Descartes, Farnham: Ashgate 2002.
• On Dialogue, Lanham: Lexington 2006.
• Dialectic and Dialogue, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2010.

Forschungskontext

Während seines Aufenthalts am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften arbeitet Dmitri Nikulin mit Rainer Forst (Professor für Politische Theorie und Philosophie an der Goethe-Universität) zusammen. Seine Aufenthalte werden von der Gerda und Alfons Kassel-Stiftung sowie dem Exzellenzcluster »Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen« gefördert.