In the introduction to their 1984 volume on Philosophy in History, Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner describe their vision of a comprehensive (and incidentally impossible) “Intellectual History of Europe”: Imagine a thousand-volume work entitled The Intellectual History of Europe. Imagine also a great convocation of resurrected thinkers, at which every person mentioned in [...]
Category Archives: philosophy
Sketch for “Romanticism Without Borders” workshop series
For a few months I’ve been thinking of starting a workshop series on the influence and legacy of different forms of romanticism around the world. Each workshop would have a day or half day of short papers on a variety of topics, authors and works. The workshops would be accessible to a non-specialist audience. I’ve [...]
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The contingent cathedral: notes on Lewis White Beck’s Early German Philosophy
Lewis White Beck‘s 1969 Early German Philosophy is a long, rich and rambling chronicle of philosophical thinkers and philosophical ideas originating from what we now call Germany, roughly from the birth of St. Ambrose in 340 to the death of Kant in 1804. Beck opens the book with the question “Can there be, should there [...]
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Leibniz’s Funny Thought
Last night I went to the 25th annual Long Night of Museums in Berlin, where over 125 museums, galleries and archives are open until the early hours of the morning for live music, films and talks. As well as some Javanese gong music and a rendition of Philip Glass’s Dance 2 in the Berliner Dom, [...]
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The Magus in New York
Johann George Hamann, “the Magus of the North”, was a minor civil servant working in tax administration, a Lutheran pietist, prolific lettrist, and polyglot. He is best known for his short, rhapsodic, densely allusive and often pseudonymous dispatches – on everything from erotic love to the importance of the letter ‘h’ – and for his [...]
Also posted in events, hamann, nietzsche, talks, wittgenstein Tagged comparativeliterature, conferences, german, hamann, newyork, nietzsche, philosophy, talks, theology, wittgenstein 3 Comments
Jonathan Gray