About Us

The German Philosophy Workshop began life in the Fall of 2010 as a forum for the study of German philosophy. In 2018, the German Philosophy Workshop joined forces with the Wittgenstein workshop to form a new workshop with a broader scope.

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 Germany 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.
  7. Cutting-edge work by contemporary German philosophers on topics in all areas of philosophy.

Meetings of 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.

The German Philosophy Workshop is generously supported by the Council on Advanced Studies at the University of Chicago.

Faculty sponsors: Matthew Boyle and James Conant

Student coordinator (2023-24): Michael Powell