Michael Neil Forster | |
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Born | December 9, 1957 |
Education | Princeton University (PhD), Oxford University (BA) |
Era | 21st-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Continental |
Institutions | University of Chicago, Bonn University |
Thesis | Hegel and Skepticism (1987) |
Doctoral advisor | Raymond Geuss |
Doctoral students | Rachel Zuckert |
Main interests | philosophy of language, hermeneutics |
Michael Neil Forster (born December 9, 1957) is an American philosopher and the Alexander von Humboldt Professor, holder of the Chair in Theoretical Philosophy, and Co-director of the International Center for Philosophy at Bonn University, where he has taught since 2013. He is an expert on 18th- and 19th-century German philosophy, especially Herder and Hegel.
Forster earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1987, where he worked with Raymond Geuss and Michael Frede. [1] He became Assistant Professor of in Philosophy and the College at the University of Chicago, rising to the rank of Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor before moving to Bonn. He remains a visiting professor at Chicago. [2]
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.
Philosophy of history is the philosophical study of history and its discipline. The term was coined by the French philosopher Voltaire.
Philosophical skepticism is a family of philosophical views that question the possibility of knowledge. It differs from other forms of skepticism in that it even rejects very plausible knowledge claims that belong to basic common sense. Philosophical skeptics are often classified into two general categories: Those who deny all possibility of knowledge, and those who advocate for the suspension of judgment due to the inadequacy of evidence. This distinction is modeled after the differences between the Academic skeptics and the Pyrrhonian skeptics in ancient Greek philosophy. Pyrrhonian skepticism is a practice of suspending judgement, and skepticism in this sense is understood as a way of life that helps the practitioner achieve inner peace. Some types of philosophical skepticism reject all forms of knowledge while others limit this rejection to certain fields, for example, knowledge about moral doctrines or about the external world. Some theorists criticize philosophical skepticism based on the claim that it is a self-refuting idea since its proponents seem to claim to know that there is no knowledge. Other objections focus on its implausibility and distance from regular life.
Johann Georg Hamann was a German Lutheran philosopher from Königsberg known as "the Wizard of the North" who was one of the leading figures of post-Kantian philosophy. His work was used by his student J. G. Herder as the main support of the Sturm und Drang movement, and is associated with the Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism.
Johann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism. He was a Romantic philosopher and poet who argued that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people. He also stated that it was through folk songs, folk poetry, and folk dances that the true spirit of the nation was popularized. He is credited with establishing or advancing a number of important disciplines: hermeneutics, linguistics, anthropology, and "a secular philosophy of history."
The Phenomenology of Spirit is the most widely discussed philosophical work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; its German title can be translated as either The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel described the work, published in 1807, as an "exposition of the coming to be of knowledge". This is explicated through a necessary self-origination and dissolution of "the various shapes of spirit as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge".
Stanley Louis Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.
Karl Löwith was a German philosopher in the phenomenological tradition. A student of Husserl and Heidegger, he was one of the most prolific German philosophers of the twentieth century.
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits is a book by 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1878. A second part, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, was published in 1879, and a third part, The Wanderer and his Shadow, followed in 1880.
Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served more than 30 years as a professor at Princeton University.
Frederick Charles Beiser is an American philosopher who is professor emeritus of philosophy at Syracuse University. He is best-known for his work on German idealism and has also written on the German Romantics and 19th-century British philosophy.
Paul Guyer is an American philosopher and a leading scholar of Immanuel Kant and of aesthetics. From 2012, he was Jonathan Nelson Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Brown University until his retirement in 2023.
Carl Joachim Friedrich was a German-American professor and political theorist. He taught alternately at Harvard and Heidelberg until his retirement in 1971. His writings on state and constitutional theory, constitutionalism and government made him one of the world's leading political scientists in the post-World War II period. He is one of the most influential scholars of totalitarianism.
Robert Buford Pippin is an American philosopher. He is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the college at the University of Chicago.
William Wallace was a Scottish philosopher and academic who became fellow of Merton College and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University. He was best known for his studies of German philosophers, most notably Hegel, some of whose works he translated into highly regarded English editions. While reputedly forbidding in manner, he was known as an able and effective teacher and writer who succeeded in greatly improving the understanding of German philosophy in the English-speaking world. He died at the age of 52 after a bicycle accident near Oxford.
Espen Hammer is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. Focusing on modern European thought from Kant and Hegel to Adorno and Heidegger, Hammer’s research includes critical theory, Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology, German idealism, social and political theory, and aesthetics. He has also written widely on the philosophy of literature and taken a special interest in the question of temporality.
Ivan Soll is an American philosopher who is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States. He taught at UW from 1965 until his retirement in May 2011. His teaching and research focused on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosophy in general, existentialism, aesthetics, and various figures of continental philosophy.
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, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa., and the Fondazione San Carlo di Modena, where he taught a graduate seminar in Italian on German Idealism. He lectured on Marx and German Idealism as Visiting Professor at Beijing Normal University in 2013 and 2015. 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.
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.
Yitzhak Yohanan Melamed is an Israeli philosopher and a leading scholar of Spinoza and modern philosophy. He is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a master's degree in history & philosophy of science from Tel Aviv University and a philosophy PhD from Yale University. Melamed has won numerous fellowships and grants, including the Fulbright (1996-8), American Academy for Jewish Research (2003-5), Mellon (2005), Humboldt (2011), NEH (2012), and ACLS-Burkhardt (2012) Fellowships, and taught intensive masterclasses at the University of Toronto (2016), École normale supérieure de Lyon (2016), Peking University (2017), and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (2019).