报告题目：From coffee house to nation state: the rise of public languages in the modernizing Ottoman empire

报告时间：2012年2月28日（周二） 下午4:00-5:30

地点：新斋105会议室

报告人：Michiel Leezenberg （阿姆斯特丹大学 哲学系 教授）

摘要：The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has argued that the rise of the public sphere in the eighteenth century created the preconditions for the modern Western liberal democratic state. He ignores the fact, however, that the main locus of this new public sphere, the coffee house, is in fact of non-Western origin, coming from the Ottoman empire; he also ignores the constitutive role played by language in the articulation of the publis sphere. In this talk, I will look at the rather distinct development of the Ottoman public sphere and the concomitant emergence of new public languages, which turned out to be the foundation for the later development of nationalist movements. Thus, I hope to contribute to a comparative approach to political philosophy by sketching the different trajectories of the public sphere in different parts of the world, and the distinct constitutive roles that new usages and ideologies of language usage played in it.