In his seminars on the death penalty, Derrida argues that Kant’s defense of that punishment is the most rigorous and systematically philosophical. For that same reason, he says, the arguments are especially vulnerable to deconstruction. I argue, in detail, that Derrida’s deconstruction fails if Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal is respected, which Derrida’s arguments do not specifically challenge. I close with some considerations for philosophical opponents of the death penalty. Derrida seeks a condemnation of capital punishment that (...) is, in its way, a priori, disassembling its justification at the conceptual level. I suggest that contingent and empirical condemnations of capital punishment may be sufficient. (shrink)

How to classify the artistic and philosophical movement of Early German Romanticism remains a topic of ongoing disagreement. I consider the views of two of the leading interpreters—Frederick Beiser and Manfred Frank—and argue that the latter’s are closer to the truth. Beiser, however, has noticed a lacuna in the literature surrounding the metaphysics and epistemology of the Romantics, namely their debt to an ascendant Plato during their intellectual development. This is right, but Beiser’s idealist reading of the Romantics leans heavily (...) on Platonic sources that are fundamentally incompatible with a consistent anti-foundationalist strain in Romantic thought. I argue that it is unlikely that Plato influenced the Romantics in the way Beiser suggests. (shrink)