Peter Niesen
12.30-2.00pm | Wednesday 2 December 2009
Room NAB 1.07, New Academic Building, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, LSE
Speaker
Peter Niesen, Professor of Political Theory and History of Ideas, Institute for Politics, Technische Universität Darmstadt
Immanuel Kant’s work on freedom of speech is not among the best-known parts of his philosophy, but has much to offer today’s discussions. Among his various arguments, two seem based on a cosmopolitan conception of free expression. Kant argues that the public use of reason should be free among cosmopolitan citizens, and that people have cosmopolitan rights to make communicative claims on others. Yet it is unclear what the relation between these two arguments is, and how they can contribute to today’s debates on the freedom of border-crossing communication.