.jpg?width=500 "Kant")
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What happened today? Dates from the history of philosophy.
Ivan Illich was born on 4 September 1926; Albert Schweitzer died on 4 September 1965. One asked at what point institutions built for people begin to govern them; the other opened the boundary of the moral community to all living things. Both regarded the idea of progress from a critical distance.
Edward Coke died on 3 September 1634; Oliver Cromwell on 3 September 1658. One wrote that the king stands under the law; the other executed the king and failed to build a lasting order in his place. Two deaths on the same date hold the founding question of modern political philosophy from both ends.
William Rowan Hamilton died on 2 September 1865; Franz Neumann on 2 September 1954. One sought the ground of algebra in Kant's intuition of 'pure time'; the other argued that Nazi Germany was not, in fact, a state at all. Two deaths on the same date ask the same question from different places: what holds a structure up?
Michel Serres was born on 1 September 1930; Stanley Cavell on 1 September 1926. One brought philosophy together with science and myth, the other with cinema and ordinary language. Two thinkers born on the same day did the same work by different routes: opening philosophy's border with something from outside it.
Hermann von Helmholtz was born on 31 August 1821; his account of perception as a system of signs took Kant into the laboratory. On the same day in 1867, Baudelaire, who gave the word 'modernité' its present sense, died in Paris. Both were born in 1821, and both asked what the modern eye sees.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in London on 30 August 1797. Frankenstein, written when she was eighteen, has become two centuries later the most cited literary text in the ethics of artificial intelligence. The same day in 1871 brought the birth of Ernest Rutherford, who would discover the atomic nucleus.
John Locke was born at Wrington on 29 August 1632. A theory of knowledge that made the mind a blank sheet, a political philosophy that tied property to labour and a defence of toleration place him among the founding writers of the modern world.
Augustine died on 28 August 430 in Hippo, a city then under siege. Sixteen centuries later, a discovery announced this year has brought two previously unknown sermons of his to light. Goethe was born on the same day in 1749.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart on 27 August 1770, 256 years ago today. The system that read history as the unfolding of reason has spent two centuries being both the most closely followed and the most flatly rejected philosophy there is.
