Recent History of German Philosophy at the University of Chicago
The intensity of teaching, research, and conference activity at the University of Chicago revolving around topics and figures in German Philosophy emerged from a series of cooperative ventures over the past twenty years. The majority of these were two- or three-way ventures between some combination of the Philosophy Department, the Germanic Studies Department, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Some of the most substantial of these ventures were funded through the Humboldt Foundation. Each of these, in turn, enabled the development of thriving axes of cooperation between the University of Chicago Philosophy Department and philosophy departments and centers of interdisciplinary research in Berlin, Bonn, Frankfurt, Göttingen, Leipzig, Osnabrück, and Potsdam. The five largest such cooperative projects between Chicago and a partner institution in Germany funded to date by the Humboldt Foundation are the following:
- From Transcendental Logic to the Analysis of Practice in the Tradition of Aristotle, Hegel, and Wittgenstein. Three-year Humboldt Trans-Coop Program Grant for cooperation between Chicago and Leipzig, 1999–2001.Click here for more information.
- General and Transcendental Logic in the Tradition of Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein. Three-year Humboldt Trans-Coop Program Grant, 2002–2004 for cooperation between Chicago, Basel, and Leipzig. Click here for more information.
- Anneliese Maier Cooperation Between Chicago and Potsdam. Five-year research prize awarded to James Conant from 2011–2016 for cooperation between the University of Chicago and the University of Potsdam. Click here for Johannes Haag’s laudatio and project description.
- Humboldt Cooperation Between Chicago and Bonn. Five-year research prize awarded to Michael Forster from 2014–2019 facilitating cooperation between the University of Chicago and the University of Bonn. Click here for more information about our present ongoing cooperative venture with Bonn.
- Humboldt Cooperation Between Chicago and Leipzig. Five-year research prize awarded to James Conant from 2017–2022 facilitating cooperation between the University of Chicago and the University of Leipzig. Click here for more information about our present ongoing cooperative venture with Leipzig.
The Humboldt Foundation projects listed above were largely centered on cooperation between the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago and departments of philosophy in Germany. There have also been a number of major projects devoted to interdisciplinary research in German thought and literature. Most of these were supported at least in part through funding from the Franke Center for Humanities. The following three were the largest of these interdisciplinary projects — the first two were funded with the aid of the Mellon Foundation, the third by the Neubauer Collegium:
- Inquiries in Aesthetic Theory, Forms of Representation, and the Logic of the Humanities: The Problem of Non-Discursive Thought from Goethe to Wittgenstein. Two-year Sawyer Seminar, 2005–2007 at the University of Chicago. Click here for more information about the seminar.
- The Second Person: Comparative Perspectives. Two-year SIAS Summer Institute, co-sponsored by the University of Chicago and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, that took place at the National Institute of Humanities at Chapel Hill in August 2011 and in Berlin in August 2012. Click here for more information about the seminar.
- The Idealism Project: The Concept of Form in German Idealism and Beyond. Two-year large-scale collaborative project, 2015–2017 at the Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago. Click here for more information on the project.
A third related interdisciplinary project funded by the Humboldt Foundation drew inspiration from the first of the three above projects:
- From Weimar to Vienna: The Problem of Non-Discursive Thought from Goethe to Wittgenstein. Three-year Humboldt Trans-Coop Program Grant, 2011–2014. Click here for more information.
A further initiative that contributed to interdisciplinary cooperation in this area was the founding of the Joint Program in German Philosophy, jointly administered by the Departments of Germanic Studies and Philosophy at the University of Chicago. For more information on the Joint Program, please click here.