Julian J. Potter

Bio: Julian J. Potter is an academic researcher from La Trobe University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Modernity & Civilization. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 4 publications receiving 11 citations.

Meaning in eternity Karl Löwith’s critique of hope and hubris

Abstract: The German philosopher and intellectual historian Karl Lowith is known and discussed mainly in the English language via his major work on secularization – Meaning in History, first written and published in English – and the more recently translated essays that criticize Martin Heidegger. However, Lowith’s body of work is rarely considered for the original contribution that it offers to the discourse on the questions of modernity and modern life. This oversight is due much to the way in which Hans Blumenberg and Jurgen Habermas have each ‘dealt’ with Lowith’s position; Lowith in each case becomes a flagstone in the path to their own theories. This article reappraises Lowith’s thought through an exploration of his major works, and discovers that the concepts and motivations behind the critical force of his intellectual histories suggest a more sensitive reading of the modern condition than his critics allow. His notions of nature, cosmos and eternity, and his steadfast skepticism, reveal Lowith to be a theo...

Big city blues

Abstract: The advent of the ‘mega’ or world city seems inseparable from the ambivalent and transient experience of modernity – the ideals of liberty, individuality, property, accelerating progress, and, for many, the realities of immobility, anonymity, poverty, and arresting regression. When more than half of the global population pursues an existence within an urban frame, the densities and boundaries of urban spaces swell to fantastical proportions. With the vast increase in size, so the experiences and expectations of the city become more pronounced and profound. This introduction to this special issue of Thesis Eleven, ‘Big City Blues’, discusses the themes and stories of the articles below, which present different aspects of life in the metropolis. The over-stimulation of the desensitized urbanite, the wandering flâneur who fortifies him/her self against fragmenting pressures, the explosion of everyday peace into riots, the battles for political and social recognition of identity and property rights, and the f...

The Spengler Connection: Total Critiques of Reason After the Great War

Abstract: This chapter examines the influences that Oswald Spengler’s opus The Decline of the West had on contemporary philosophy. It describes affinities and similarities between that work and the historical critiques of reason prosecuted by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Heidegger’s ‘history of Being’. At question is no less than the meaning of rationality, the place and purpose of truth, and the destiny of civilization. The discussion here limits itself to noting commonalities and similitudes, in the context of the wars.

The Urbanism of Exception: The Dynamics of Global City Building in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: This book challenges the conventional (modernist-inspired) understanding of urbanization as a universal process tied to the ideal-typical model of the modern metropolis with its origins in the grand Western experience of city-building. At the start of the twenty-first century, the familiar idea of the 'city' - or 'urbanism' as we know it - has experienced such profound mutations in both structure and form that the customary epistemological categories and prevailing conceptual frameworks that predominate in conventional urban theory are no longer capable of explaining the evolving patterns of city-making. Global urbanism has increasingly taken shape as vast, distended city-regions, where urbanizing landscapes are increasingly fragmented into discontinuous assemblages of enclosed enclaves characterized by global connectivity and concentrated wealth, on the one side, and distressed zones of neglect and impoverishment, on the other. These emergent patterns of what might be called enclave urbanism have gone hand-in-hand with the new modes of urban governance, where the crystallization of privatized regulatory regimes has effectively shielded wealthy enclaves from public oversight and interference.

Urban crisis: ‘Limits to governance of alienation’

Abstract: This article aims to develop a comparative framework of analysis to study urban crises, arguing that there is a need to establish the analytical links between ‘everyday life and systemic trends and...

Perth as a ‘big’ city Reflections on urban growth

Abstract: The bigness of cities has attracted much attention from urban academics and professionals whose perspective may be divided into two camps: productive science using agglomeration-based analysis or impact science using anxiety-based analysis. The two approaches need to be joined in order to resolve issues of urban ‘bigness’, and in this article the growth of Perth is used to illustrate the potential and challenges of this integration.