About me

My name is Maja Schepelmann, and I work in the field of philosophical editions; currently for the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences). Since 2005 I have almost frequently been occupied with support work for the new edition of Immanuel KANT´s complete publications, in the context of the Academy edition of his works. This is a very small-scale and laborious effort, of which the public is rather unaware, which will not change even when, some day, the newly edited volumes of this edition will be published.

Apart from this, I have published two monographs on KANT which pursue an as yet untried approach, that is: understanding Kant´s complete works as a systematic project whose ways of proceeding and methodical details were planned right from the beginning, to then be successively worked out and published in the form of scripts and treatises over a period of fifty years. Thus, I contradict the currently valid, historicising interpretation of Kant which assumes that his thought changed constantly und permanently over time and left older ideas behind. My demand is this one: Let us see if a non-historicising approach is perhaps more adequate. The fact that for the time being no one has had this idea does not necessarily mean that it is wrong. According to my reading, all those statements and considerations Kant is said to leave behind are nothing but provocations which were purposefully composed into his texts: provocations which are always connected to the claims to validity of theories or ideas coming from tradition or being contemporary. He presents these provocations as a special kind of philosophical irony, indeed by only very subtly indicating that these are indeed not his own convictions or theories but that he presents something which, in the context of what he claims to be philosophy – which in contrast he works out and explains without irony – cannot be maintained. This is not meant as jesting as an end in itself but for the purpose of making the readers think themselves. For, Enlightenment also means: please do not swallow everything written by somebody somewhere but start using your own reason and your own judgment.

For an author, the best way of supporting this is triggering it in progressu. Thus seen, basically philosophy becomes thrilling again: something which may inspire and change the readers, not just theoretically but by its immediate effect. In this sense, even current philosophy might benefit much from such ways of proceeding which, after all, go back to Plato´s philosophy.

Thus, if it is really true that we may speak of the discovery of rhetoric methods and sceptical irony with a classical author, then in my opinion this discovery, in view of today´s philosophy in the West, indicates that, after all, the only way to see and understand is to make use of two eyes: an analytical and a hermeneutic eye. Unfortunately, the hermeneutic eyes of many philosophers have meanwhile got blind. Nevertheless, valiantly and with much ballyhoo one claims that the remaining analytical eye is completely sufficient – and this is completely wrong simply because, as I believe, anybody thinking hermeneutically will easily be able to look at and understand formal-semantic explications, whereas those thinking purely analytically, on the other hand, are neither able nor willing to extrapolate hermeneutic thought. Consequently, according to the horizon of their method they declare hermeneutics to be useless; only that unfortunately they have lost any awareness of the fact that their method and thought is not the only one certified for philosophy.

On this website, apart from further texts on Kant or on more general topics, I am soon going to present a major project I have been dealing with for many years. Starting out from Martin Heidegger´s philosophy and analysis of time, under the title "Time Atlas" I am going to attempt a methodology of time-critical approaches. Like a map of the world shows the various continents and landmasses, this time atlas is going to map the as yet presented theoretical approaches as well as the reasons given for methods of analysing time, and furthermore it is going to present an as yet untried theory of time which, as a newly discovered continent, might change the overall picture.