Upcoming Issue on Nicolai Hartmann (2025)

Contents

Call for Papers

1Forum Philosophicum, an international philosophical journal, invites submissions to a Special Issue entitled “Reading Nicolai Hartmann. Ideas and Dialogues,” to be published in open-access form by the University Ignatianum in Cracow at the end of June 2025.

2Nicolai Hartmann is one of those forgotten philosophers who had to wait a long time to be rediscovered. Fortunately, in the last decade research on his philosophy underwent a revival, both from historical and systematic perspectives. After the foundation of the Nicolai Hartmann Society in 2009, a custom of organizing an international Hartmann conference every few years was established. Four such conferences were held since then: Rome (2009), Trento (2014), Saint Petersburg (2017), and Katowice (2019). Thanks to these events, but also to many other more local conferences, seminars, and publications dedicated to his philosophy, the interest in Hartmann’s thought appears to be growing every year.

3Two collective books on his thought were published in English in the last decade (The Philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann, ed. R. Poli, C. Scognamiglio, F. Tremblay, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2011, and New Research on the Philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann, ed. K. Peterson, R. Poli, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2016), one in German (Nicolai Hartmanns Neue Ontologie und die Philosophische Anthropologie: Menschliches Leben in Natur und Geist, ed. M. Kalckreuth, G. Schmieg, F. Hausen, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2019), as well as a German edition of the protocols of the meetings of the philosophical discussion group led by Hartmann over three decades (Nicolai Hartmanns Dialoge 1920–1950: Die „Cirkelprotokolle“, ed. J. Fischer, G. Hartung, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2020). Three of Hartmann’s main books were also recently translated into English (Possibility and Actuality, transl. by A. Scott and S. Adair, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 2013, Aesthetics, transl. by E. Kelly, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 2014, and Ontology: Laying the Foundations, transl. by K. R. Peterson, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2019) along with some of his shorter texts (namely, “How is Critical Ontology Possible?” transl. by K. R. Peterson, 2012, “The Megarian and the Aristotelian Concept of Possibility,” transl. by F. Tremblay and K. R. Peterson, 2017, and “Max Scheler,” transl. by F. Tremblay, 2019).

4The present book attempts to pursue this exploration of Hartmann’s thought and to present it to the international audience. Most of the chapters in this volume have been selected from the papers presented at the Nicolai Hartmann International Conferences in Katowice, Poland (13–14 June 2019). Other papers, namely, those of J. Fischer, L. F. Mendoza Martínez, P. Cicovacki, and D. Jonkus, have been invited. Although the authors did not consult each other about the topics to be discussed, the volume nevertheless happens to have a thematic coherence indicative of current trends in Hartmann scholarship. One of the common themes, the most represented in the collection, is the issue of Hartmann’s relation to Russian thought (see the papers of Tremblay, Pietras and Belov, Cicovacki, Jonkus, and the first translation in the translations section). The second common theme is Hartmann’s relation to the Hegelian philosophy, especially his interpretation of Hegel’s dialectics (see the papers of Pietras and Belov, Gargani, and the second translation).

5The first part of the volume regards primarily the historical context of Hartmann’s thought. The author of the first historical paper is Andrzej J. Noras (1960–2020). He deals with the Marburg Neo-Kantian’s context of Hartmann’s thought to show it under new light. The novelty of his view consists in claiming that a deeper knowledge of relationships and developments within the philosophical theories of the Marburg Neo-Kantian school (Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp) leads to the recognition that Hartmann’s project of a new ontology should no longer be seen as a complete departure from Marburg Neo-Kantianism but rather as a project born out of a criticism and reformulation of their thoughts. Furthermore, the historical section of the volume includes two papers dedicated to the relation between Hartmann and Russian thought, especially Russian ontologism. Frédéric Tremblay deals with the relation between Hartmann and Nikolai Lossky. He provides evidence that Hartmann studied with Lossky and compares their philosophies on epistemological and metaphysical issues. Alicja Pietras and Vladimir Belov examine the parallel ontological turns of Hartmann and Vasily Sesemann as strictly related to their understanding and interpretation of Hegel’s dialectics. They claim that Hartmann and Sesemann, who inspired each other, not merely called for the ontological turn but also realized it. Pietras and Belov claim that the essence of their ontological turn was an attempt to define being as a dialectical process. The topic of Hegelian themes in Hartmann’s thought is also covered by Matteo Gargani. The latter provides a concise presentation of Hartmann’s interpretation of Hegel in its historical context and its main historiographical goals. He argues that Hartmann’s reading of Hegel’s dialectic as a “real dialectic” is linked to his exploration of the relations between Aristotle and Hegel. The historical part also includes Bianka Boros’s paper on Hartmann’s understanding of the concept of critique. The author explores these elements of Hartmann’s thought that are the most related to the concept of critique, like problem-thinking vs. system-thinking, the concept of the irrational, critical ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics. She also briefly presents the Hungarian philosopher László Tengelyi’s criticism of Hartmann’s concept of infinity and her own reply to it. Joachim Fischer discusses what he calls, using a Goethean expression, the “elective affinity” between Hartmann’s ontology and the anthropological theories of Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen. He argues that the relation between Hartmann’s ontology and philosophical anthropology is two-sided. On the one hand, he says, Hartmann’s project of a new ontology was a condition of the possibility of the modern philosophical anthropology; on the other hand, the rise of the modern philosophical anthropology was crucial for the content of Hartmann’s new ontology. Fischer calls that the “Cologne constellation” of the twentieth century in German philosophy. Luis Fernando Mendoza Martínez’s paper explores the concept of gnoseological relation in Hartmann and Heidegger. The author defends Hartmann’s ontology of cognition against Heidegger’s criticism. Based on careful analyses of Hartmann’s theses, he shows that – contrary to what Heidegger claims – Hartmann neither holds the subject to be an enclosed entity nor believes that knowledge has ontological prominence over experience in our access to the world. The last historical paper, written by Miloš Kratochvil, addresses the theme of the reception of Hartmann’s philosophy in Czechoslovakia, more precisely in the thoughts of four Czech thinkers: Ferdinand Pelikán, Vladimír Hoppe, Jan Blahoslav Kozák, and Vladimír Kubeš. He shows that Hartmann’s philosophy was well known to a number of Czech philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century.

6The second part of the volume is dedicated to the systematic study of certain issues, more specifically axiology, ethics, and aesthetics. Leszek Kopciuch presents very detailed and systematic analyzes of Hartmann’s concept of freewill in the context of compatibilism and incompatibilism. He demonstrates some internal difficulties that appear in Hartmann’s ontology of freedom; in particular he attempts to prove that Hartmann’s understanding of freedom leads to the acceptance of indeterministic elements in the real world. Simona Bertolini explores the relevance of Hartmann’s ethics for contemporary environmental ethical issues. She claims that, although Hartmann does not belong to the tradition of environmental philosophy per se, his ontology and anthropology may nevertheless offer sufficient ground to justify a broadening of the scope of morality to include the non-human natural world. Keith R. Peterson compares Hartmann’s value ethics with the liberation ethics of the Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel. Focusing on two aspects of these theories – their conception of the value of “life” and their ability to respond to the need for a “world history of ethical systems” – he argues that there is a productive, mutually complementary relation between them. He suggests supplementing Hartmann’s individual ethics with Dussel’s collective approach, on the one hand, and, on the other, to enrich Dussel’s “material principle” with Hartmann’s theory of axiological and ontological dependencies. In Cicovacki’s paper, the reader will find again an attempt to connect Hartmann with Russian thought but in a systematic rather than a historical manner. The author is using Hartmann’s ethics of value to answer Tolstoy’s question of the meaning of human life. Hartmann’s answer to Tolstoy is that we do not need to grasp the infinite and absolute for life to have meaning; all we need is to accept our limitation and notice the power of our limited possibilities. The meaning of our life can be found only through our personal and authentic participation in the fullness of our limited and imperfect life. The last paper of this part, written by Dalius Jonkus, deals with the structure of the aesthetic object, while also eliciting the Russian context of Hartmann’s philosophy by presenting his view together with the aesthetic theory of Vasily Sesemann. Jonkus argues that both Hartmann’s and Sesemann’s aesthetics are tied to phenomenology by explaining that, in their conceptions, the aesthetic object is internally related to aesthetic experience. According to both philosophers, even though the structure of the aesthetic object is co-determined by aesthetic perception, this does not for that matter lead to aesthetic subjectivism.

7The last section of the book contains translations of two of Hartmann’s papers. The first one, translated by Alicja Pietras and Predrag Cicovacki, is a translation of Hartmann’s review, first published in Kant-Studien in 1933, of Vasily Sesemann’s paper “Die logischen Gesetze und das Sein” (“Logical Laws and Being”). This paper is directly connected to the two key themes of the volume: it is connected to the Russian context of Hartmann’s thought insofar as in this review Hartmann displays a very positive opinion of Sesemann’s ontological investigations and insofar as Hartmann therein presents his interpretation and use of Hegel’s dialectics. The second one, translated by Frédéric Tremblay, is Hartmann’s “Hegel und das Problem der Realdialektik,” first published in Blätter für deutsche Philosophie in 1935. In this article, Hartmann provides a clear and concise exposition of his interpretation of Hegelian dialectics — an interpretation that should not be underestimated by historians and systematic researchers of Hegel’s dialectics.

8All the papers written by non-native speakers of English, i.e., nearly all papers, contained in this volume were proofread by Frédéric Tremblay. For this service, the other editors would like to thank him heartily.

9Guest Editors

10Frédéric Tremblay

11Alicja Pietras

12Leszek Kopciuch

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