I deliver modules at all levels in my areas of research, German intellectual history & German-language drama, as well as German language. Examples of modules include Reason and its Rivals from Kant to Freud, a module that discusses a selection of theoretical approaches to modernity, beginning with Kant's assertion of individual reason as the founding stone of enlightened social organisation, and interrogations of that position in the work of Marx and Engels, Nietzsche and Freud. It discusses historical views on such issues as the nature of the individual subject, different assessments of the social, political or moral contract, and views as to the role and fate of culture in that social organisation, as well as competing ideas of the status of reality as based in social or material conditions or the product of the will, drives, or ideology. My final year module, Twentieth Century German: from Avant Garde to Virtual World, examines how German language theatre has employed, thematised or responded to new forms of media in the course of the C20th. Drawing on theoretical writings about theatre and the media, and ranging from Piscator's theatrical work in the 1920s to media theory and dramatic practice at the brink of the C21st, the module examines how German theatre has contributed to ideas about representation and the status of the real.
Current Research
My current research project, entitled '"Tearing the fabric:" the turn to experience in mid-eighteenth century German writings' examines a collection of thinkers, writing between 1740 and 1780, who express misgivings for various reasons about the philosophical project of grounding as it becomes increasingly separated from lived experience. Writers include Christian August Crusius, the 'philosophical doctors' of Halle (Johann Gottlob Krueger, Ernst Anton Nicolai, and others), Johann Georg Sulzer, Johann Nicolas Tetens, and the poet, novelist and theorist Johann Karl Wezel.
The project involves original research on the above writers, and will bring together common elements of their concerns and approaches for the first time in a single book-length study, which will allow their work to be seen, if not as a homogeneous tradition, then as a coherent body of ideas that bridges the dominant movements of rationalism and transcendentalism, and challenges the principles of both.
So, for instance, Crusius has tended recently to be identified as a philosopher who prioritised actuality over essentialist abstraction, but I will explore the ways in which abstraction was accorded value in his writings, in terms of both the aims and methods of philosophy. The ambivalence that this engenders may be attributed to his sense of the complexity of reality as limiting the possibility for and value of separating out necessary grounds and contingent experience.
The essays written by the medical doctors associated with the University of Halle in the 1740s, led by Krüger, are best known for their non-systematic, practically-oriented contributions, in contrast to the metaphysical-rationalist tradition that preceded them. I will explore the heterogenous discussions of methodology and epistemology in the essays, which often contain conflicting statements, reflecting their location at a hinge-point in philosophical thinking.
Recent assessments of Sulzer's contributions describe them as hybrid - part rationalist, part empiricist - and this is supported by much textual evidence. But my research will ask whether his experiential ideas supplemented or challenged rationalist principles, by examining his adherence to and divergence from rationalist principles and tropes: the privileging of ideas, his use of the concept of perfection, and his reflections on human autonomy, which are in tension with his characterisations of the self as incomplete and relational.
Tetens voiced some of the clearest concerns about the epistemological reliability of deduction and the reductiveness of abstraction from experience. But he was also the closest, both temporally and conceptually, to Kant's apriorism, which was just starting to reshape the remit of philosophy. Whilst many of Tetens' formulations anticipated Kant's conceptualisation of the grounds of understanding - as universal, necessary, fundamentally divorced from experience, and established by means of deduction - I will ask whether his persistent concerns about abstraction must be understood as serious challenges to the validity of Kant's new, aprioristic approach.
Collaboration
My collaborative work has contributed significantly to the research environment at UoN, including co-organizing two international conferences (2009, 2011), both of which gained external funding & resulted in edited books, & more recent School-wide interdisciplinary research workshops, on 'Empiricisms' (2016) and 'The Everyday' (2017), bringing together external speakers & internal postgraduate researchers. After a Covid-related caesura, a third event is being planned for May 2025, under the concept of 'Selfhoods'.
Past Research
My most recent research project, culminating in a monograph entitled Anthropology's Interrogation of Philosophy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century (Lexington Books, 2018), analyses the parallels between the philosophical anthropology that is associated with Kant, Herder and Ernst Platner in the late C18th and philosophical positions taken up by those associated with philosophical anthropology in the C20th, for instance Max Scheler, Helmut Plessner and Karl Loewith. The discussion will touch on anthropology's critique of Kantian philosophy, its reflections on the subject-object relation, its alleged adherence to naturalist epistemology, and its conception as a 'doctrine of nature' inimical to history. Thinking associated with anthropology will be seen to mobilise a critique of dualism and apriorism which I take to suggest ways beyond the dichotomy of subject and object. Key discussions include Husserl and Scheler's approaches to phenomenology and apriorism, Herder and Heidegger's contrasing attitude to the philosophy of being, and Hans Blumenberg and Charles Taylor's contrasting attitudes to the attitude of anthropology as a theorisation of modernity.
My thesis, which was published in 2006 as a book entitled Art at the Limits of Perception: The Aesthetic Theory of Wofgang Welsch (Lang 2006), presents and discusses the function and value of art that is seen to operate at the extremes of perception. In the tradition of the pre-Kantian conception of aesthetics as an analogon rationis, I read the modulations of the sensory (absence as well as excess) as comparable interrogations of artistic representation, applying these categories to late twentieth century theatre, in particular that of Samuel Beckett, Peter Handke and Heiner Müller.
This discussion of the limits of perception overlaps with aesthetic theory's enduring interest in the sublime, which has also been a focus on my recent research. I have just had an article accepted for publication in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, entitled 'The limits of the sublime, the sublime of limits: hermeneutics as a critique of the postmodern sublime'. In the paper I cite both Hegel and Adorno in support of a reading of the sublime as a theoretical figure that insists that identity and meaning are generating by limits and friction between meanings. I contrast this with the tendency, running from Kant to Lyotard, to read the sublime as evidence for one or other exclusive position, such as the supremacy of reason, the total failure of representation, or the absolute aesthetic value of the sublime art object.
I have published an edited book and articles on contemporary German theatre. Recent work has included articles on the contemporary Austrian dramatist Ewald Palmetshofer, entitled 'Phenomenology and the Postdrmatic: Case Study of Three Plays by Ewald Palmetshofer'. This was included in the edited collection Postdramatic Theatre and the Political: Internaitonal Perspectives on Contemporary Performance (Bloomsbury, 2016). Another article, about the contemporary German dramatist Martin Heckmanns, entitled 'Unbestimmtheit als Methode: Die endlosen Stücke von Martin Heckmanns', reads the techniques of thematic and linguistic indeterminacy that characterise his work as a political strategy and as a comment on the status of the artist as a source of political authority.