Frederick Neuhouser

Last updated
Frederick Neuhouser
Born1957
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Wabash College (B.A.); Columbia University (Ph.D.)
Scientific career
Fields Continental philosophy, 19th century philosophy, Social theory
Institutions Barnard College, Columbia University

Frederick Neuhouser (born 1957) is the Viola Manderfeld Professor of German and a professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is a specialist in European philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries, especially Rousseau, Fichte, and Hegel.

Contents

Education and career

Neuhouser graduated from Wabash College (Crawfordsville, IN), summa cum laude , 1979, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. [1] Before returning to the Barnard/Columbia faculty, Neuhouser taught at Harvard University, University of California, San Diego, Cornell University and Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2021. [2]

Philosophical work

Neuhouser's focus is on German Idealism and continental social theory. He has published four books: Fichte's Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2000), which argues for the centrality of "social freedom" in Hegel's political thought; Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford University Press, 2008); and Rousseau's Critique of Inequality: Reconstructing the Second Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

His latest work Diagnosing Social Pathology: Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and Durkheim (Cambridge University Press, 2023) is centered on ideas of "social pathology" in 18th, 19th and 20th-century philosophy.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Johann Gottlieb Fichte</span> German philosopher

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher who became a founding figure of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Recently, philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Fichte was also the originator of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, an idea that is often erroneously attributed to Hegel. Like Descartes and Kant before him, Fichte was motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness. Fichte also wrote works of political philosophy; he has a reputation as one of the fathers of German nationalism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel</span> German philosopher (1770–1831)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and one of the most influential figures of German idealism and 19th-century philosophy. His influence extends across the entire range of contemporary philosophical topics, from metaphysical issues in epistemology and ontology, to political philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German philosophy</span> Specialty in philosophy, focused on German language origin

German philosophy, meaning philosophy in the German language or philosophy by German people, in its diversity, is fundamental for both the analytic and continental traditions. It covers figures such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and the Frankfurt School, who now count among the most famous and studied philosophers of all time. They are central to major philosophical movements such as rationalism, German idealism, Romanticism, dialectical materialism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, logical positivism, and critical theory. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is often also included in surveys of German philosophy due to his extensive engagement with German thinkers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling</span> German philosopher (1775–1854)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, later von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German idealism, situating him between Johann Gottlieb Fichte, his mentor in his early years, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his one-time university roommate, early friend, and later rival. Interpreting Schelling's philosophy is regarded as difficult because of its evolving nature.

Christian Hermann Weisse was a German Protestant religious philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. He was the son of theologian Christian Ernst Weisse (1766–1832).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">19th-century philosophy</span>

In the 19th century, the philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment began to have a dramatic effect on subsequent developments in philosophy. In particular, the works of Immanuel Kant gave rise to a new generation of German philosophers and began to see wider recognition internationally. Also, in a reaction to the Enlightenment, a movement called Romanticism began to develop towards the end of the 18th century. Key ideas that sparked changes in philosophy were the fast progress of science, including evolution, most notably postulated by Charles Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and theories regarding what is today called emergent order, such as the free market of Adam Smith within nation states, or the Marxist approach concerning class warfare between the ruling class and the working class developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Pressures for egalitarianism, and more rapid change culminated in a period of revolution and turbulence that would see philosophy change as well.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German idealism</span> Philosophical movement

German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with Romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. The best-known thinkers in the movement, besides Kant, were Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the proponents of Jena Romanticism. August Ludwig Hülsen, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Salomon Maimon and Friedrich Schleiermacher also made major contributions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Taylor (philosopher)</span> Canadian philosopher (born 1931)

Charles Margrave Taylor is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec, and professor emeritus at McGill University best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, the history of philosophy, and intellectual history. His work has earned him the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize.

Frederick Charles Beiser is an American philosopher who is professor of philosophy at Syracuse University. He is one of the leading English-language scholars of German idealism. In addition to his writings on German idealism, Beiser has also written on the German Romantics and 19th-century British philosophy. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research in 1994, and was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Right Hegelians</span>

The Right Hegelians, Old Hegelians (Althegelianer), or the Hegelian Right, were those followers of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the early 19th century who took his philosophy in a politically and religiously conservative direction. They are typically contrasted with the Young Hegelians, who interpreted Hegel's political philosophy as supportive of left-wing and progressive politics or religion.

<i>Naturphilosophie</i> Current in 19th-century German idealism

Naturphilosophie is a term used in English-language philosophy to identify a current in the philosophical tradition of German idealism, as applied to the study of nature in the earlier 19th century. German speakers use the clearer term Romantische Naturphilosophie, the philosophy of nature developed at the time of the founding of German Romanticism. It is particularly associated with the philosophical work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—though it has some clear precursors also. More particularly it is identified with some of the initial works of Schelling during the period 1797–9, in reaction to the views of Fichte, and subsequent developments from Schelling's position. Always controversial, some of Schelling's ideas in this direction are still considered of philosophical interest, even if the subsequent development of experimental natural science had a destructive impact on the credibility of the theories of his followers in Naturphilosophie.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Axel Honneth</span> German philosopher

Axel Honneth is a German philosopher who is the Professor for Social Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Jack B. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities in the department of philosophy at Columbia University. He was also director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main, Germany between 2001 and 2018.

Judith Nisse Shklar was a philosopher and political theorist who studied the history of political thought, notably that of the Enlightenment period. She was appointed the John Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University in 1980.

Dieter Henrich was a German philosopher. A contemporary thinker in the tradition of German idealism, Henrich is considered "one of the most respected and frequently cited philosophers in Germany today", whose "extensive and highly innovative studies of German Idealism and his systematic analyses of subjectivity have significantly impacted on advanced German philosophical and theological debates."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patrick T. Riley</span>

Patrick Thomas Riley was Michael Oakeshott Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is notable for his translations of the political writings of Gottfried Leibniz and his research on social contract theory, the general will, and the history of universal jurisprudence.

Douglas Moggach is a professor at the University of Ottawa and life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and has held visiting appointments at Sidney Sussex College and King's College, Cambridge, the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Moggach has also held the University Research Chair in Political Thought at the University of Ottawa. In 2007, he won the Killam Research Fellowship awarded by the Canada Council for the arts. He was named Distinguished University Professor at University of Ottawa in 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul W. Franks</span>

Paul Walter Franks is the Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Philosophy and Judaic Studies at Yale University. He graduated with his PhD from Harvard University in 1993. Franks' dissertation, entitled "Kant and Hegel on the Esotericism of Philosophy", was supervised by Stanley Cavell and won the Emily and Charles Carrier Prize for a Dissertation in Moral Philosophy at Harvard University. He completed his B.A and M.A, in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford. Prior to this, Franks received his general education at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and studied classical rabbinic texts at Gateshead Talmudical College.

Allen William Wood is an American philosopher specializing in the work of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism, with particular interests in ethics and social philosophy. One of the world’s foremost Kant scholars, he is the Ruth Norman Halls professor of philosophy at Indiana University, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and has held professorships and visiting appointments at numerous universities in the United States and Europe. In addition to popularising and clarifying the ethical thought of Kant, Wood has also mounted arguments against the validity of trolley problems in moral philosophy.

Christie McDonald is an American literary scholar, historian, cultural critic and theorist currently the Smith Research Professor of French Language and Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Research Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She is currently a member of the Emeriti Faculty. McDonald is the author and editor of numerous books and articles. Her teaching career has focused on the eighteenth century, as well as twentieth- to twenty-first-century French thought in a comparative framework. Additionally, she has published in areas of literature and philosophy, anthropology, feminist theory, and the arts.

Terry P. Pinkard is an American philosopher. He is a University Professor at Georgetown University. His research and teaching focus on the German tradition in philosophy from Kant to the present.

References

  1. "Curriculum Vitate of Frederick Neuhouser" (PDF). philosophy.columbia.edu. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-12-27. Retrieved 2021-12-12.
  2. "New Members". Archived from the original on 2021-05-23. Retrieved 2021-12-12.