Abstract

Kant’s small essay The Conflict of the Faculties was considered by Derrida a blueprint of the modern university, to be born a few years after its publication, through the works of Humboldt, Fichte, Schelling and Schleiermacher. According to Derrida, the concept of a Philosophical Faculty at the centre of the university, responsible for reason and truth, is now extinct. This paper tries to follow the arguments produced by the founding fathers of the modern university, and the way they were recovered at different points in time, by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers and Habermas, to show that through two centuries of change, the German Idea of the university kept in touch with the main arguments developed by Kant.