Bennett Gilbert

I work as both an historian and philosopher of history. My book, A Personalist Philosophy of History, published by Routledge in early 2019, explores personalism as an approach to ethics and to the moral remit of the study of the past. I continue to write papers developing themes and problems in the field. I am now working on a monograph that develops a full historicity-based normative moral philosophy. Another current long-term research project is the philosophical concepts of verification of truth and transfer of authority, especially moral authority, through copying, casting, reflection, and other forms of representation in late Medieval philosophy prior to the introduction of printing, 1375-1450, Here are views about the nature of creation, regeneration, and other matters that were ontological pre-conditions for the many new techniques of duplication invented or deployed in this period. My interest are the philosophy and theory of history and the intellectual history of Europe and the United States from earliest times to the present, with special interests currently in the "pre-printing period" of c. 1375 to 1450 and in Rococo style in arts and sciences c. 1710-1740. As an historian I am interested in the relations of conception and production as a crucial point in developing a theory of intellectual history. I have a wide range of interests in intellectual history from antiquity to the present day. In examining intellectual history I try to study the moral worlds of historical actors at all levels of society. As a philosopher of history my work revolves around fundamental ethics, including the relations of ethics and ontology and the history of moral philosophy. In philosophy of history I am especially interested in the relationship of moral thought to historical method and in neo-idealist approaches to time, memory, and historiographic re-constructions. As both historian and philosopher I am interested in object-oriented ontology but am a strong critic of it.