Med Kallias, eller om skönheten, en serie brev skrivna 1792–93, introducerade Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) en ny idé om konstens autonomi i den västerländska filosofin. Konstverket, argumenterade han där, är ett föremål som har den särskilda förmågan att framträda som självbestämmande. Att konsten är autonom betyder därför inte att den är objektivt fri, att den är oberoende av materiella eller historiska bestämningar. Det betyder att den i kraft av sin form kan ge sken av att vara fri. ”Skönhet”, skrev Schiller, ”är alltså inget annat än frihet i framträdelse”. 

Texterna i den här antologin har sitt ursprung i konferensen Kallias, eller om skönheten: om estetik och politik hos Friedrich Schiller, som ägde rum på Södertörns högskola våren 2023. Konferensen arrangerades med anledning av att Schillers text för första gången publicerades på svenska, i översättning av Gustav Strandberg (Kallias, eller om skönheten, 1|21 Press, 2023). Deltagarna var forskare i filosofi och estetik vid Södertörns högskola och andra svenska och nordiska lärosäten. I denna antologi undersöker de hur Schillers tankar om konstens autonomi först tog form, hur de mottogs i Schillers samtid, hur de har levt vidare i den efterföljande kritiska filosofin, samt hur de ska förstås i dag.

In Patočka’s later thought, death is a recurring theme. It is something that he analyzes phenomenologically and existentially, but also a theme that is related to his critique of modernity and to his philosophy of history. In this article, I analyze the question of death more broadly in Patočka’s later philosophy in order to show how his reflections in “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” can shed new light on his understanding of our co-existence with others and provide us with a phenomenological concretion that is lacking in his more speculative philosophy of history. By relating “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” to Patočka’s more famous analyses in the Heretical Essays, we can also understand the interconnection between his political thought and his so called “a-subjective phenomenology” in greater detail.

From its very inception philosophy has been preoccupied with death, so much so that many philosophers have received the reputation of being somber, melancholic, and morbid in nature. By continuously reflecting on the meaning and nature of death, philosophers have seemingly been shrouded in darkness to such an extent that their contemporaries considered them to be dead long before they met their own demise. While this image of the moribund philosopher can certainly be questioned, the fact remains that many philosophers, and then especially the ancient ones, have insisted that there is an essential relation between philosophical thought and death. A life dedicated to philosophy would, it seems, at the same time imply a life lived in the shadow of death.

In this article, Strandberg analyses the development of Swedish cultural policy during the last decades. In contradistinction to the first policy proposition from 1974, which emphasised the importance of counteracting the negative impact of the market, the cultural policies that have been in place for the last twenty to thirty years consider the forces of the market to be conducive to the freedom of culture and the arts. This has entailed a paradigm shift in Swedish culture that has opened up the field of cultural policy for the so-called creative industries, equated culture with creativity, and collapsed the distinction between culture and creative forms of entrepreneurship. When analysing this, Strandberg relates the modern history of Swedish cultural policy to the wider international development that has given rise to the paradigm of the creative industries and discusses how the equation of culture with creativity has made the autonomy of culture and the arts more and more difficult to uphold.