Larissa Wallner Postdoctoral Fellow Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: October 2024–July 2025 Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: » ›Future of Democracy‹: Adaptive and resilient democracy« Project outline: Motivated by the positions of Sheldon S. Wolin in Democracy Inc. Managed Democracy and the Specter of inverted Totalitarianism (2008) and with reference to Habermas’ Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (2022), the research project analyses a specific group of the manifold challenges for the future of democracy: the expected further increase in global information flows, their complexity and the acceleration of their distribution in the digital public sphere as well as the danger of targeted disinformation, reinforced by the entry of artificial intelligence into the public sphere. The hypothesis is that these developments contribute to the depoliticisation of the demos diagnosed by Wolin. In order to find resources for democracy’s resistance to the threat of the collapse of politics into the economy, the project draws on arguments by Arendt and Kant on critique, regulative ideas and the public use of reason for political judgement. The aim of the project is to develop, following on from Wolin’s melancholic diagnosis and Habermas’ structural analysis, attempts to answer the question of what adaptive capacities the democratic sovereign must adopt and realize. (Larissa Wallner) Research partner: Larissa Wallner follows the invitation of Professor Rainer Forst and the Justitia Centre for Advanced Studies funded by the Alfons and Gertrud Kassel Foundation. Scholarly profile of Larissa WallnerLarissa Wallner studied philosophy and law at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 2023, she completed her doctorate in philosophy with a thesis on the concept of theoretical productivity of Kant at the LMU Munich. Her master's thesis Dimensionen der Zeit. Die Zeitphilosophie Kants und Husserls (engl.: Dimensions of time. The philosophy of time of Kant and Husserl) was published by Passagen Verlag in Vienna in 2018. Her dissertation was published in 2024 under the title Theoretische Produktivität. Möglichkeitsbedingungen intellektueller Transgression in Kants kritischer Philosophie (engl.: Theoretical productivity. Conditions of possibility of intellectual transgression in Kant’s critical philosophy) by Vittorio Klostermann in Frankfurt am Main.Website: Main areas of research: Transcendental philosophy; German idealism; philosophy of law; postmodernism; philosophy of artSelected publications:
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