German Philosophy Workshop

The German Philosophy Workshop is run every year by two faculty members. In recent years all of the following faculty have served as sponsors of this workshop and its forerunners: Matthew Boyle, Jason Bridges, James Conant, David Finkelstein, Matthias Haase, Michael Kremer, Robert Pippin, and David Wellbery.

This workshop began life in the Fall of 2010. It serves as a weekly forum for the study of German philosophy. The workshop operates with a very broad understanding of the tradition of German Philosophy, encompassing the following seven dimensions of the tradition: (1) German Idealism and its precursors (with a special emphasis on the close reading of Kant’s and Hegel’s major works); (2) 19th-century German philosophy (especially Schopenhauer, neo-Kantianism, neo-Hegelianism, Marxism, and Nietzsche); (3) 20th-century German philosophy (especially the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions); (4) the elucidation and development within the Anglophone tradition of central concepts, methods, and concerns of the German tradition (such as transcendental argument, genealogical critique, phenomenological method, etc.); (5) the German tradition in analytic philosophy (from its roots in Frege, through the Vienna Circle, up until the present); (6) the Wittgensteinian tradition, both as it contributes to the analytic tradition and where it departs from it; and, last but not least, (7) cutting-edge work by contemporary German philosophers on topics in all areas of philosophy. In connection with this last dimension, the workshop will invite a number of contemporary German philosophers each year to present their ongoing work. Meetings of the workshop will be more or less evenly divided between sessions devoted to discussion of graduate student work in progress and presentations by outside speakers working in one of the seven aforementioned areas.

Participation in the workshop is required for students in either the Department of Philosophy or the Department of Germanic Studies who are enrolled in The Joint Program in German Philosophy. Participants from outside the Departments of Germanic Studies and Philosophy are welcome. See our website for a schedule of the workshop’s meetings and more information about the workshop’s activities.

 

Faculty sponsors for 2020/21:  James Conant and Matthew Boyle

Graduate student coordinator: Michael Powell

Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/germanphilosophy/