The first paper, “Plato, Derrida, and Democracy in Crisis” by Dr. James Rovira compares Plato and Derrida as different readers of Socrates. It focuses on Plato’s Ion and Republic alongside Derrida’s work from 1953 to 1968, focused particularly on Derrida’s early writings about Husserl leading up to “Plato’s Pharmacy” in 1968. It will explain how Derrida’s post-structuralism is in fact a post-idealist philosophy, describing Derrida’s engagement of Husserl as proceeding from his experiences as an Algerian Jew and the effects of the Holocaust upon his thought. Derrida’s attempt to support human freedom through his deconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology and, with it, philosophical idealism, will be contrasted with Plato’s attempt to preserve social stability through his own critique of Athenian democracy, the failure of which he dramatically witnessed in his own lifetime. Where Plato attempted to establish idealism and supplant democracy because of the horrible failure of democracy in his lifetime as he witnessed in the overthrow of democracy by the 30 Tyrants, Derrida sought to deconstruct idealism to preserve democracy because of the horrible legacy left by authoritarian governments during his own lifetime.

Dr. Steven Wexler’s “Dialectical Wittgenstein: Inference and Materiality in the Language-Game” argues that Wittgenstein, when placed in a dialectic with history, allows for the possibility of a what has been so far an elusive materialist epistemology. Robert Brandom’s insight that certain language-games have priority over others (“language has a downtown”) allows one to see Wittgenstein’s pragmatism as always-already dialectical: the space of reasons or moments of “meaning-use” contain productive inferential contradictions; language-games are contextual, normative, naturalistic, and material events. Wittgenstein’s dialectics reveal themselves through the normativity in “meaning-use” and naturalism in “family resemblances” (Sluga 2016). By “family resemblance” Wittgenstein means the linguistic and behavioral “network of similarities” that overlap, join, and allow language-games to be grouped into “families.” Such a network suggests historical, material, and cultural limits to the language game even as the game’s outcome is only ever realized in the pragmatic moment of use. As Jaroslav Perigrin explains, “[T]o be meaningful in the distinctively human way [ . . . ] is to be governed by inferential rules” (2012, my emphasis). The inferences drawn in the Wittgenstein language-game are dialectical in the present moment (synchronically) between individuals as well as through time (diachronically) between individuals and texts (e.g., counterfactually, genealogically). Given the dialectical nature of Wittgenstein’s pragmatism, one recognizes the totality in his most famous observation, that “[w]hat belongs to a language-game is a whole culture” (1966). This “whole culture” includes, not erases, the socioeconomic relations explained in materialist accounts of history and subject even if these relations were left unstated by Wittgenstein. As a result, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language is inherently historical and engaged with the history of his time, and it affirms the existence of a dialectic between language and history and between our thought about language and the time in which that thought is carried out.

Dr. Aglaia Maretta Venters’s “Perpetual and Universal Forgiveness: Hegel’s Theory of History,” drawing from the insights of figures such as Rebecca Comay, Howard Kainz, and Glenn Alexander Magee, begins with the observation that G. W. F. Hegel believed the French Revolution strayed from its first principles because many of its leaders and supporters failed to overcome a dysfunctional relationship between faith and reason inherited from history. Horrified by the Reign of Terror, Hegel became preoccupied with trying to understand how the French Revolution lost its way in a terrible failure of democratic governance and what this failure meant for the social, cultural, and political worlds of Europe. Inspired by his Lutheran background to gain perspective on the French Revolution, Hegel came to understand that humanity’s collective work is to overcome the misdeeds of past generations while leaving the future to make amends for past trespasses. Because humanity makes progress by oscillating between successes and mistakes, Hegel's analysis of history provides insight into how the present came into being, allowing his analysis of European political, social, economic, and cultural realities during the last decade of the eighteenth century to set him on his quest to forgive humanity and its world. Hegel’s theory of history developed from his desire to address our collective human duties to forgive and to seek forgiveness in the realms of thought shared within communities based upon religious, geographic, and cultural identities. Reconciliation of perceived opposites (faith vs. reason, good vs. evil, etc.) became, for Hegel, the means through which humanity could use knowledge of the past to learn to forgive the past and to hold the present accountable for the future.