The symposium was a part of the open joint study “Philosophy and the University” , whose main objective was to reexamine the understanding of the university of various philosophers as well as well as the relationship between philosophy and the system and ideals of the university.

The Conflict of Faculties (1798) along with Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is one of the last works Kant published in his lifetime. Several of the essays of the first edition were banned by the censorship and in the preface there is an excuse to Friedrich Wilhelm II, who did the censorship. A theory of the university is developed in the first part “Conflict of the Faculty of Philosophy and the Faculty of Theology”. Although only 20 pages in the Japanese translation it really poses an abundance of questions.

The short-term program “Philosophy and University – Genealogy of Modern Philosophical Theories of the University and the Future of Humanities Knowledge” has started. At the first meeting we discussed Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins, made a survey of the historical relationship between philosophy and the university and analyzed the present conditions of the humanities in the age of globalization.