By Julio Alcántara · Wednesday, February 27, 2013 The following paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
 When we ask, once again, about the sense and origin of the West, we are led to a spatial relation of meaning that humans have with the world and with themselves. The essence of this act is based on the fundamental values of this era, which define the borderlines of the present’s symbolic extension: the human being, as a spatial-being, is also temporal. In fact, spatial differences are not more that multiple fields of temporal states of being. In short, what brings us together today is the polemic signification of the space-time limit of the occidental man and, as such, of the factual possibility of being in the world.
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By Greg Melleuish · Monday, February 11, 2013 The following paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
We live in an age of History Wars.
Most of them are national in focus.
There is, however, one that touches on the issue of Western civilization, and that is the perceived conflict between Western civilization and world history.
Advocates of world history castigate Western civilization for pretending to be universal when, in fact, it is partial and prejudiced.
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By Alessandro Vitale · Friday, January 25, 2013 The following paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
“Russia and the West” is a topic that never seems to be exhausted, and as a question, one that can never be answered satisfactorily. People and intellectuals use a staggering number of criteria to determine Russia’s suitability (or lack thereof) to be counted “Western,” ranging from the geographic and the linguistic to the political and institutional. For centuries, Russians have wondered if they are part of “Europe.” It is evident that geographically and culturally they are “Eurasians.” In any case, about three-quarters of the Russian population live west of the Urals, in what has always been considered a part of Europe. Russia has been connected to Europe for centuries. All the important movements, relevant things that Russia has made in history, have been through its connection to Europe. Russia has really been and remains an important part of Europe. But Russia is not only Europe.
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By Chantal Bax · Monday, January 14, 2013 The following paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
Should national identity be considered to be an outdated concept in this day and age? Have the adjectives “French,” “Italian,” “German,” and so on become meaningless terms over the last couple of decades? Both practical and theoretical developments may seem to suggest that this question should be answered in the affirmative. Processes of globalization, including increased mobility and migration, have made it unmistakably clear that the human world cannot be divided into discrete social units. In addition, much philosophical effort has been devoted to destabilizing notions like “community,” “sameness,” and “identity.”
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By Simon Glendinning · Monday, January 7, 2013 The following paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
How should we conceive the distinctive character, the “particular rarity,” of the wearing and growing of the contemporary world? How should we come to terms with our time? What words can we find that are fitting for its specificity when so many of the words we have found fitting hitherto, especially promising words about the course of human history and its political hopes, its hopes in the political (modernity, Enlightenment, civilization, socialism, etc.) sound more and more like the road signs of another age?
Are we not floundering today? Isn’t this, at least in part, what we need to understand, to make intelligible? So we might look out for writings, wherever they come from, that speak to and speak from this world, a world which today, it seems, more than ever, “wears as it grows.”
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By David Pan · Wednesday, January 2, 2013 The following paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
Since the Treaty of Westphalia, sovereignty in the West has been imagined in terms of the nation-state and its ability to provide a universal basis for political relations both within state boundaries and in relations with other similarly organized entities. On the one hand, the nation-state originates as a means of overcoming the religious civil wars, and its establishment coincides with the attempt to relegate theological disputes to a private sphere that does not threaten the structure of the state. In this way, the state as opposed to the church becomes the primary form for defining the political. On the other hand, the development and stability of the nation-state system seems to have been inextricably linked to the dynamic of colonialism. As Carl Schmitt lays out in The Nomos of the Earth, the establishment of a jus publicum europaeum that created guidelines for limiting war between European states was accompanied and indeed predicated upon a complementary establishment of the amity lines that distinguished Europe from the rest of the world as the place of such limited war as against the “freedom” of the spaces beyond the line in which restrictions on warfare did not apply. For Schmitt, the relationship between these two dynamics, the coalescence of nation-state relations in Europe on the basis of a limitation of war and the establishment of unlimited war in those areas outside of Europe without nation-state structures, has not been coincidental but in fact constitutive for both the rise of the West and the structure of international relations in the modern world.
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