Abstract
Next year in Prague, when we meet in the spring of 2017 for the yearly Philosophy and Social Science conference in Villa Lanna, it will be 25 years since we started up. It will be the jubilee year for the conference. Some of us have come every year. Suddenly we have to explain why we came the last 25 years.
There are a lot of good reasons for coming to the yearly conference in Prague. The city is in the middle of Europe on the limit between the East and the West. Therefore, the city gives a good perspective on Europe. As a simple fact, Prague is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. The conference takes place in Villa Lanna, which is run by the Czech Academy of Science. It is a wonderful Italian-style villa with a large terrace and garden, which gives good possibilities for gathering and relaxed conversations. The format for the conference is perfect because of the size of Villa Lanna and not at least the size of the lecture hall that permits a participation number of only around 100 persons. Therefore, the conference is very intimate and perfectly organized by its directors. It is completely informal. Still, it has no home page, there is not a formalized participant list, and it is only in the last years that the program has been distributed beforehand.
Each year, there is an impressive string of presentations. Many philosophers and social scientists participate in the discussion of many topics in philosophy and the social sciences. However, critical theory is the pivotal point in the discussions of many topics related to philosophy, political philosophy, theory of law and political sociology. It would be impossible to mention all the many good lecturers who have presented during the time. Last year we had around 120 presentations registered. I can mention only some examples, as follows: Jean Cohen, Andrew Arato, Seyla Benhabib, Alessandro Ferrara, Ian Shapiro, Iris Marion Young, Max Pensky, Martin Saar, David Held, Charles Taylor, Amy Allen, Hubertus Buchstein, Gurminder Bhambra, Johann Arnason, María Pía Lara, John Holmwood, Pieter Duvenage, Nancy Fraser, Frank Michelman, Peter Niesen, Rainer Forst, Maeve Cooke, Steven Winter, Marek Rhubek, Ken Baynes, Jim Bohman, Peter Dews, Gordon Finlayson, Rahel Jaeggi, Robin Celikates, Eva Erman, Eli Zaretsky, Matthias Kettner, Jodi Dean, David Strecker, Bill Scheuerman, David Rasmussen, Christina Lafont, Martin Matustik, Regina Kreide and Hartmut Rosa. However, the list could continue and be very long.
Therefore, it is not difficult to justify why so many of us come back year after year. The same procedure continues year by year. Next year in Prague! It is wonderful to meet the other participants who come for the same reason as well. Many connections and friendships are made. Prague has become the right place for discussions of critical theory.
The reason why we came to Prague was that civil war broke out in former Yugoslavia in 1991. Alessandro Ferrara has in his contribution also described in detail how this change took place. Prague is in fact a form of exile from Dubrovnik. The participants at the Philosophy and Social Science conference in Dubrovnik were only a single group among several other groups who came together every year in Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia. We were a critical theory group. We discussed many of the same topics as the fathers of critical theory such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and others in Frankfurt in the 1930s. In our group, for example, Albrecht Wellmer, Axel Honneth, Rainer Forst, Klaus Günther, Christoph Menke, Günther Frankenberg and many others participated, some of whom later on created the research program ‘Normative Orders’ at Frankfurt University. However, at the same time other groups came to the same university center in Dubrovnik. A great year was around 1990 when at the same time Karl-Otto Apel came together with Hauke Brunkhorst, Matthias Kettner and others to Dubrovnik. They discussed ‘die Letztbegründung’ in the discourse ethics. More than that, there was an interesting feminist group, which brought new perspectives into the common discussions. In the middle of this discussion forum, Niklas Luhmann showed up and gave a lecture about social systems, which parked critical theory as an antiquated item without actuality at the museum of the history of ideas.
The meetings in Dubrovnik had a long history back to the 1970s, when Habermas and Richard Bernstein created the first course ‘Philosophy and Social Sciences’ at the new international institution the Interuniversity Centre for Post-Graduate Studies as a continuation of the Yugoslavian praxis group’s conference at the island of Korčula in the 1960s. Richard Bernstein has described this period in his contribution.
Critical theory is a long tradition, which has integrated many theoretical perspectives on its way from Frankfurt in the 1930s until our time, when the theory has its place at many universities in Europe, the USA and the rest of the world. These many theoretical perspectives are also represented at the Philosophy and Social Science conference in Villa Lanna in Prague. Therefore, we will continue to say ‘Next year in Prague!’