(In)stabilitas loci, or University in the Time of Populism

Contents
Introduction
1. Romantic dream and Jaspers’s idea. The Humboldtian perennial model of university
1.1. Preliminary remarks on the idea: its contemporary context and most common misunderstandings
1.2. Pre-romantic and Romantic prelude to the idea. Two symbolic figures: G. W. Leibniz and J. G. von Herder 7
1.2.1. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Academy and modal metaphysics
1.2.2. Johann Gottfried von Herder – mitigated optimism and Bildung
1.3. From Bildung and Geist to a mitigated, pragmatic idea. Karl Jaspers’s broken evolution of views
1.3.1. Geist, Auslese, and aristocracy of spirit. Pre-history of the third edition of The Idea of the University
1.3.2. Thinking the Idea after the caesura: the English edition of 1959 and the final German edition of 1961
1.4. An excursus on the Forgotten. Heidegger and the impatience of Being
1.5. Contesting the idea. Jürgen Habermas and his Lernprozesse (1986)
2. A hope for a democratic world? University between Jaspers’s ideal and the rise of the TQM culture. Pierre Bourdieu and his Homo Academicus
2.1. “Without truth there is no freedom, without freedom there is no peace”? Civic grounding of university
2.2. Pierre Bourdieu and his Homo Academicus. A case of a broken equilibrium
3. From groundlessness to meaninglessness: neoliberalism’s assault on higher education
3.1. An attempt at diagnosis. An ambiguous description of our present
3.2. A tentative answer: re-renegotiating the meaning of time
Addendum: Some untimely remarks on the so-called independent scholars
Bibliography
Abbreviations