Teaching
University of Chicago
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Spring Quarter 2026–27
Nature, Feeling, and Freedom: German Idealism Between Kant and Hegel
Course description
How did we get from Kant to Hegel? Only thirteen years after Kant’s publication of the Critique of Pure Reason, Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s students in Jena were awestruck by his lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Science). This event is often seen as marking the transition from the Enlightenment to German Idealism, a radical innovation in philosophical style, method, and subjects of study. While among other things the Enlightenment sought to understand the possibility of science, philosophers now inquired how to integrate a scientific worldview with non-scientific parts of human experience, including mythology, art, and the experience of nature. The philosophical transition coincided with the rise of Romanticism in German poetry, the French Revolution and its effects on European politics and thought, and an increasing political influence of the concepts of nationality and the cultural unity of the German people.
In this course, students will aim to understand the shifting intellectual landscape in Germany between 1790 and 1808 by studying a variety of texts, including early responses to Kant, and works by Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, as well as Novalis and Hölderlin. Special attention will be paid to the typically much neglected role of women in German Idealism, including Caroline Schlegel-Schelling and Karoline von Günderrode.
University of Cambridge
Lectures
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Lent term 2023–24
Virtue Ethics
Seminars
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2022–23
Descartes’ Meditations
Supervisions
One-to-one teaching in the Cambridge Philosophy Tripos, except where noted.
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2021–22, 2022–23, 2023–24
Part II, Paper 4: European Philosophy from Kant
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2021–22, 2022–23
Part IB, Paper 7: Political Philosophy
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2021–22
Part IB, Paper 1: Knowledge, Language, and World
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2021–22
Part IB, Paper 3: Ethics
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2021–22
Philosophy of Economics