On June 5th, we welcome the second cohort of Doctoral Students to our internal Colloquium aka Toolbox in the Summer Term of 2025, introducing the concepts and methods of Contradiction Studies.
paradox
“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”
Andreas Fischer-Lescano
decolonial scholarship
“Creating decentralizing and decolonizing scholarship on contradiction, contradictory phenomena, and contradicting processes is a challenging task.”
Kerstin Knopf
hierarchy of norms
“If social contradictions are reflected in law, law cannot form a hierarchy of norms free of contradictions.”
Andreas Fischer-Lescano
idea of democratic critique
“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”
Martin Nonhoff
relational
“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”
Ingo H. Warnke