Germany's philosophers open the Nazi file; China orders an 'autonomous' philosophy
The German Society for Philosophy has launched a working group on philosophy and National Socialism, conceding that the subject has no settled place in research or teaching. In Beijing, sixty scholars debated how to build a 'Chinese autonomous philosophical knowledge system', a phrase that belongs to Xi Jinping. And a sociologist's book on reproduction in Palestine/Israel reaches a philosophy audience.
Two of the world's largest philosophical communities spent the past fortnight arguing, in very different registers, about the same thing: what a national philosophy owes to the state it lives under. In Germany the argument is retrospective and uncomfortable. On 9 October the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Philosophie, the professional body for academic philosophy in the German-speaking world, announced that a new working group on "Philosophy and National Socialism" had begun its work, and its founding statement says plainly that the discipline has never given the subject a fixed place. In China the argument is prospective and official. A report published on 29 September by the Chinese Social Sciences Net summarises a Beijing symposium at which sixty scholars discussed how to build a "Chinese autonomous philosophical knowledge system", a formula that originates not in a seminar room but in a speech by Xi Jinping.
The two stories are not symmetrical. One is a learned society asking what its predecessors did between 1933 and 1945; the other is a research establishment answering a brief set by the leadership of a one-party state. But both put the same question to philosophers. Philosophy likes to think of itself as the discipline that stands outside politics and judges it. The German working group exists because that self-image failed once, catastrophically; the Chinese programme exists because the state has decided the self-image is a luxury it will not fund.
A third item closes this report, briefly: a sociologist's book on fertility treatment and Palestinian women in Israeli hospitals, discussed on 5 October in an online series run by the British magazine The Philosopher. It is ethnography with a contested framework, and we report both the argument and the published objections to it.
A learned society admits a gap in its own history#
The DGPhil's new Arbeitsgemeinschaft was announced on the society's website on 9 October, and its own page sets out why it is needed. The normative order built after 1945 in reaction to National Socialism, it says, is under pressure eighty years after the end of the war. Yet philosophy's part in the regime, including its contribution to establishing and justifying it, remains little researched. Most philosophical dictionaries and encyclopaedias, the statement notes, contain no entry on the subject at all. And then the sentence that will sting most inside German departments: "In Forschung und Lehre hat die explizite Auseinandersetzung mit Philosophie im NS keinen festen Platz" — in research and teaching, the explicit confrontation with philosophy under National Socialism has no fixed place.
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The group's premise is that this is not a story about one or two notorious individuals. A broad part of the discipline took part in the regime, the statement says, and "NS-Philosophie" must therefore be treated as part of the history of German-language philosophy rather than as an aberration outside it. That framing matters. The usual way of handling the period has been biographical and defensive: Martin Heidegger's rectorship at Freiburg in 1933, his party membership and the Black Notebooks have absorbed a disproportionate share of the attention, as if the question were whether one great thinker could be quarantined from his politics. Readers of this site will know the Heidegger of the technology essays; the working group's interest lies in the less celebrated colleagues who made the institutions run.
The spokespersons are David Palme of Heidelberg, who acts as contact, Johannes Steizinger of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Lea Schwab of Zürich, Anna Maria Hartmann of Jena and Werner Konitzer of Frankfurt an der Oder. Membership is open to anyone; the statement says that one's own research on the topic is welcome but not a condition, and that the spokespersons decide on admissions. The group names three partners: a research network on "National Socialism, Morality, Philosophy"; a Jena project on how to handle racism, sexism and antisemitism in the works of classical German philosophy; and a digital database of philosophy in exile between 1933 and 1945, also based at Jena.
What will it actually do? The list is modest and concrete: forums for researchers and teachers, including discussions of work in progress; bibliographies and curricula; help for doctoral candidates in finding supervisors in a field where supervisors are scarce; virtual and in-person meetings, and joint appearances at conferences. The stated aims go further than housekeeping, though. The group intends to examine philosophy's self-understanding and the history of its associations and institutions before, during and after the Nazi years, with attention to continuities as well as breaks. It also says it will attend to the "Fortwirken", the continuing effect, of National Socialist, völkisch and fascist convictions in philosophy and in society today, and to philosophy's responsibility for such thinking. A historical project, in other words, with an explicitly present-tense motive.
The group did not appear from nowhere. From 29 to 31 July the Kolleg Friedrich Nietzsche held an international conference at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar under the title Philosophische Wege in den Nationalsozialismus: Ideen, Netzwerke und Kontexte, organised by Marion Heinz of Siegen, Helmut Heit of Weimar and Steizinger. The programme reads like a draft syllabus for the working group: Steizinger on Alfred Baeumler's path "from Kant to Nietzsche" into National Socialism; Matthias Schlossberger asking whether there was a philosophy of National Socialism at all, with Arnold Gehlen as his case; Gideon Stiening and Herlinde Pauer-Studer on Carl Schmitt and the jurists around him; Heinz on law and the state in Heidegger's thinking of the 1930s; Konitzer on Julius Ebbinghaus and National Socialist morality; Palme on the "war deployment" of philosophy.
Two things stand out. The first is how much of the list concerns figures still read for other reasons, Gehlen and Schmitt above all, usually with the 1930s left in a footnote. The second is the refusal to reduce the question to Heidegger, who received one paper out of thirteen. The impulse is not confined to Germany: on 17 August Adam Knowles of Zürich lectured at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne on "Useful for the Purposes of Fascism? Philosophy under National Socialism", reconstructing the discipline's contribution from the surveillance files the regime kept on it.
Whether the DGPhil's initiative changes anything will depend on things learned societies control only partly: whether the bibliographies get used, whether the doctoral students find jobs, whether a dictionary entry finally appears. That the blank page is now acknowledged is itself the news.
Beijing asks what an 'autonomous' philosophy would be#
On 12 September the School of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Minzu University of China hosted a symposium in Beijing marking seventy years of the university's philosophy discipline and forty years of its department. Its title, in the Chinese Social Sciences Net's two-part report of 29 September, was "Philosophical Theoretical Innovation and Constructing China's Autonomous Philosophical Knowledge System". More than sixty scholars took part, from the Central Party School, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Peking, Tsinghua, Renmin and Fudan universities and a long list of provincial institutions.
The phrase needs decoding, because it is not an academic coinage. On 25 April 2022, visiting Renmin University, Xi Jinping said that accelerating the construction of philosophy and social sciences with Chinese characteristics "comes down, in the end, to constructing China's autonomous knowledge system" (建构中国自主的知识体系). Official commentary since then, including a People's Daily column of 12 March 2024, has glossed the aim as three systems, disciplinary, scholarly and discursive, marked by "subjectivity and originality", and tied it to the party's doctrine of combining Marxism with Chinese reality and tradition. "Autonomous" therefore means autonomous from Western categories, not from the state.
Read with that in mind, the proceedings are more interesting than the title suggests, because the scholars disagreed about what the brief permits. Tang Wenming of Tsinghua argued that Western categories should not be applied directly to Chinese thought, but pointed to the Neo-Confucian absorption of Buddhism and Daoism as proof that "subjectivity" means creative transformation of foreign sources, not their rejection. Zhang Wei of Sun Yat-sen University observed that autonomy demands methodological initiative rather than merely Chinese materials. You Yang of Shanxi University issued a warning that reads almost as dissent: identifying concepts cannot be manufactured by exaggerating uniqueness, and must be clear enough for scholars to argue about.
Several contributions were plainly philosophical. Han Donghui of the Central Party School distinguished knowledge, intelligence and wisdom in the age of artificial intelligence: machines excel at symbolic computation and pattern recognition, he argued, while human intelligence is rooted in social and historical practice and carries creativity, responsibility and value. Wang Jun, dean of philosophy at Zhejiang University, refused to let philosophy's difficulties be lumped with "the crisis of the humanities", on the ground that philosophy has always been close kin to the sciences and that AI should pull it towards foundational research, not away from it. Pan Bin of East China Normal University proposed keeping classical reading, logic and argumentation at the centre of training while adding joint degrees in AI and philosophy. Chen Zhong of Soochow University proposed extending the Lefebvrian theory of the production of space into a concept of "spatial civilisation" fit for Chinese urbanisation.
Other contributions were as political as the title. Zhao Dunhua of Peking University argued from archaeology that Chinese civilisation grew indigenously rather than being imported. The session on religion was the most explicitly governmental: Zheng Xiaojun, director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of World Religions, set out four dimensions for the "sinicisation of religion" and called for a Marxist religious studies with Chinese characteristics.
It would be easy to read all this as cultural nationalism with footnotes, and some of it is. But the question underneath is one philosophers outside China have been asking for a generation in the vocabulary of decolonisation: whether the concepts through which modernity has been described, the individual, society, right, the state, are universal or merely European categories generalised. Tu Weiming, whose New Confucianism this site discussed recently, asked whether one must westernise in order to modernise. His Confucianism was dialogical and could be refused; a knowledge system commissioned by the leadership cannot be. The best contributions, Tang's and You's among them, read as attempts to keep room for argument inside a brief that does not obviously leave any.
A sociologist's book reaches a philosophy audience#
On the evening of Monday 5 October The Philosopher, the British quarterly founded in 1923, hosted an hour-long conversation on Zoom under the title "Reproductive Injustice and Settler Colonialism". The speakers were Gala Rexer, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in sociology at the University of Warwick and an honorary research fellow at University College London's Sarah Parker Remond Centre, and Andréa Becker, assistant professor of sociology at Hunter College in New York and author of Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy. The occasion was Rexer's first book, Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel, published this year by the University of California Press in its series "Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the 21st Century".
The publisher's description sets out the thesis. Drawing on more than two years of ethnography with Israeli medical staff and Palestinian women undergoing fertility treatment, the book treats hospitals, fertility clinics and maternity wards as sites for studying how Palestinian lives are governed. Its claim is that the everyday surveillance and control exercised in doctor-patient encounters deserve attention alongside the more visible forms of state violence; the author calls this "tender violence", and argues that reproductive injustice is a constitutive element of the settler-colonial project rather than a side effect. The framework is the Black feminist concept of reproductive justice, and the book is written, in the publisher's words, from an anticolonial feminist perspective. A planned seminar at the University of York on 14 October has been cancelled, the department says, because of a scheduling clash.
The philosophical interest does not depend on accepting the politics. Whether care can be a vehicle of power rather than its opposite is a question that runs from Foucault's biopolitics to the ethics of nursing, and Rexer pursues it at the level of a consultation rather than a theory. The frame she adopts, however, is contested, and the objections are on the record. Rachel Busbridge, in a 2018 article in Theory, Culture & Society, argued that the settler-colonial "turn" in the study of Israel-Palestine inherits from Patrick Wolfe a structural account that leaves little room for transformation, imports connotations from Australia and North America that do not fit, and sidelines the conflict's national dimensions. Adam Kirsch's On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (Norton, 2024) goes further, rejecting the paradigm's application to Israel as a form of symbolic condemnation that no country's founding would survive. The book's endorsers, among them Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, author of Birthing the Nation, praise exactly what those critics would dispute: that the injustice is "a feature, not a side effect". No scholarly review of Demographic Anxieties itself had appeared by the time of writing. When one does, the argument will be about whether the clinic bears the weight the frame places on it, which is a question evidence can answer.
This afternoon in New York, under the French presidency, the Security Council holds its first meeting devoted to the possibility that frontier AI systems slip out of human control. The briefers are Yoshua Bengio and the chief executives of OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face. Whether the Council is the right room is itself in dispute.
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