In the following article I will discuss the context in which Kant used the theological concept of chiliasm. Kant introduced the concept of chiliasm to reflect the complexity of the feasibility of the idea of the highest good in the world. To achieve this, Kant made an effort to liberate chiliasm from an exclusively theological meaning and gave it a meaning consistent with his own philosophy. The introduction of the concept of “philosophical chiliasm” represents an alternative (...) to the strategy of the realization of the idea of the highest good presented in Critique of Practical Reason. We need not think of the feasibility of the highest goals of morality as those guaranteed by God alone. Since at least 1784 Kant has made it clear that the feasibility of these goals is also conceivable on the basis of the guarantees of nature itself. Philosophical chiliasm is thus Kant’s original answer to the question of the feasibility of the idea of the highest good in the world. The final answer is given in Towards Perpetual Peace. (shrink)

Although now forgotten, Paul Nagel was one of the most notorious seventeenth?century critics of orthodox Lutheranism. His Prognosticon Astrologo?Cabalisticum (1618) and Stellae Prodigiosae (1619), in which he sketched a complex astrological?prophetic system, were followed by numerous books and pamphlets over the next five years in which he predicted the arrival of the Last Judgement in 1666. Although the failure of his prophecies for 1624 led to a collapse of interest in his prognostications, he turns out to have been a key (...) figure in early seventeenth?century Protestantism. How he strayed from his original orthodox position is the subject of this essay. (shrink)

Kant’s concept of chiliasm is part of his research about history. More specifically, it is an aspect of the empiriological strategy which Kant pursues through this research. The aim of this strategy is to combine in methodological necessity experience and reason by way of cultivation, civilisation and moralisation, in order to obtain the general and fundamental dignity of human beings instituted as the „Weltbürgerrecht“, the only complete state of enlightment and as that by apriority the telos of history.

ABSTRACT Ernst Bloch is a philosopher of hope, of this there can be no doubt. It is the fidelity to the proposition that a better world is possible that undergirds Bloch’s work. Yet, the hopeful tenor of Bloch’s philosophy, as I argue here, is accompanied by a second, more subterranean strand: a concern with the phenomenon of disappointment. Bloch has an interest in what happens after hope fails; those moments when the desire for utopia confronts the impossibility of its realisation. (...) By considering Bloch’s philosophical history of the defeat of the chiliastic movements of the medieval moment alongside his ontology of not-yet-being, the claim is made that disappointment has a constitutive role in the philosophy of hope, such that the dream of a new world is mediated through the history of its failures. Hope and disappointment are entangled, the power of the former indexed to the act of confronting the latter. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the role of the first principle in Fichte’s philosophy of history and assess the extent to which its introduction is able to resolve problems in the philosophies of history of his predecessors. Particularly, I focus on Fichte’s response to the question of how history can be grasped in a systematic manner for the purposes of theoretical cognition. I argue that while Fichte is able to resolve the tension between Herder’s pluralism and Kant’s chiliasm in (...) an innovative manner, the deployment of his first principle is ultimately unsuccessful in establishing historiography on a firmer scientific foundation. (shrink)

Part I. The golden age and primitivism -- The savages -- Prometheus and Orpheus -- Atlantis -- Part II. The blossoming and decline of culture -- The age of blossoming in Athens -- Alexandria -- Part III. The problem of a national golden age -- The Roman model: golden age as a modern disease -- From classicism to romanticism -- Part IV. Kingdom of God -- German tradition of chiliasm -- From eschatology to kairology -- The gospel of nature (...) -- Medievalism as the externalisation of the golden age -- Conclusion. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida's vision of 'messianicity' in his book Specters of Marx and the essay 'Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone' has been widely appreciated by scholars. Yet little fundamentally critical engagement appears to have been made with some important historical-sociological questions raised by Derrida's ideas in these texts. Drawing on earlier reference-points in 20th-century critical theory and sociology, the present article argues for some objections to Derrida's presentation of the significance of religious (...) messianism in modern Western social and political thought. The central claim defended is that Derrida invidiously marginalizes some important non-messianistic idioms, sources and traditions of thinking about religious history and its bearing on contemporary social and political self-understanding. (shrink)