Dit project onderzoekt hoe de laatmoderne opkomst van depressie samenhangt met een transformatie van de moderne westerse subjectiviteit. Een filosofisch-historische analyse situeert deze stemmingsstoornis ten opzichte van eerdere verschijningsvormen ervan, voorheen veelal aangeduid als melancholie. Een kritiek op de heersende omgang met psychische stoornissen opent begripsruimte voor andere benaderingen.

Populism, claim culture and radical fundamentalism, together with the culture of complaint in affluent societies, challenge us to reconsider the issue of ressentiment. This research project proposes a fundamental affect theory of political culture in which the conceptual entanglement of ressentiment with democracy is critically revisited. This will be done in relation to the contemporary crisis of citizenship, signaled by the paradox that despite the success of modern emancipatory movements, citizens continue to experience themselves as handicapped subjects. This paradox is reflected by the simultaneous moralization of citizenship from a common right into a personal virtue and eventually into a means for social exclusion versus the growing feeling of impotence to live up to our moral standards. My hypothesis is that this paradox is rooted in the affective infrastructure of contemporary democracies and can be explained in terms of ressentiment. My main objective is 1. to supplement the existing but ideologically overdetermined discourse on the relation between ressentiment and democracy with a coherent political ontology of affects, inspired by Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Sloterdijk. On this basis, I will 2. develop criteria for determining the specificity of democratic culture in relation to ressentiment and thus for the cultural-philosophical interpretation and evaluation of recent developments ranging from anti-elitarism to radicalizing fundamentalism; 3. reinterpret Arendt?s relational ontology of public action in order to explore ethical conditions under which ressentiment can be transformed into positively interested interaction. A persisting problem in this context is the double bind between ?Inter-esse? and ressentiment in mediations of publicness such as popular representation or mass media. Recent theoretical renewals of citizenship do not sufficiently take into account this affective vulnerability of democratic culture and must therefore be supplemented with a medial ethos of public life based on ?aristocratic? virtues and on a ?hygiene? of anger.

This project in philosophy seeks to develop a comparably novel answer to the venerable ontological question of what there fundamentally is. The project is guided by both: (I) the metaphysical thesis of Structuralism, according to which all that exists either is structure or is ontologically grounded in structure; and (II) our scientific knowledge about what there fundamentally is and what everything else ontologically depends on, which knowledge is stored in a few well-confirmed modern physical theories (quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and the special and general theory of relativity). The specific tasks of this Project are the following ones. A. To build a rigorous conceptual architecture on the pillar of the primitive and irreducible concepts of structure and its features, which relates these concepts to other metaphysical concepts. B. To find an axiomatic structuralist truth theory, which will tell us precisely how structures and their features make sentences in the language of the architecture (of I) true. C. To make structuralist sense of the ontic ruptures in the history of physics, notably the Relativity Revolution and the Quantum Revolution, so as to vindicate that our scientific knowledge of physical reality grows even during such ruptures (application of I and II). D. Toconstructastructuralistinterpretationofrelativisticquantumfieldtheory(whichhosts the standard model of elementary particles and their interactions), and of the general theory of relativity, so as to understand what kind of knowledge modern physics provides of physical reality, from the scale of the tiniest of ?particles? and space-time points to the entire cosmos. These theories will be rationally re-constructed within our architecture (I). Thus, this vici project encompasses the sub-disciplines of philosophy of physics, analytic metaphysics, philosophical logic, general philosophy of science and some philosophy of mathematics. A full-fledged rigorous structuralist science-based metaphysical view of physical reality will arise. 

Our image of Neanderthals is changing rapidly, and this affects long-standing views about ourselves. Increasingly, Neanderthals are regarded as capable of allegedly unique human practices (language, music, symbolism), and therefore as humans, people like us. Although the scientific image of Neanderthals has dramatically shifted, research still tends to focus on anatomical, genetic, psychic and cultural differences (“them” vs. “us”). Our project combines insights from Palaeolithic archaeology, philosophy, and gender studies to analyse how transitions in Neanderthal research challenge our self-understanding, reopening the question: what makes us human?