Kristin Gjesdal

Written in the 1780s, when slavery was a hotly debated issue in France, Germaine de Staël’s Mirza, or Letter from a Traveler addresses topics such as enslavement, free trade, freedom, and the relationship between Europe and Africa. When the author, nine years later, decided to publish the novella, it was accompanied by Essay on Fictions, a veritable manifesto for an engaged, philosophical literature. However, in the scholarship, Mirza is typically treated independently of Staël’s aesthetic manifesto. The present paper seeks to overcome this shortcoming. It shows how her early abolitionist novella sheds light on her moral psychology – particularly her discussion of greed – but also on her philosophy of literature.

ABSTRACT Written in the 1780s, when slavery was a hotly debated issue in France, Germaine de Staël’s Mirza, or Letter from a Traveler addresses topics such as enslavement, free trade, freedom, and the relationship between Europe and Africa. When the author, nine years later, decided to publish the novella, it was accompanied by Essay on Fictions, a veritable manifesto for an engaged, philosophical literature. However, in the scholarship, Mirza is typically treated independently of Staël’s aesthetic manifesto. The present paper seeks to overcome this shortcoming. It shows how her early abolitionist novella sheds light on her moral psychology – particularly her discussion of greed – but also on her philosophy of literature.

In German eighteenth-century culture, Shakespeare’s work was translated, staged, and discussed with a passion that has remained unrivaled. Philosophy was no exception to this trend. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Lessing, Herder, and Schlegel all turned to Shakespeare’s work and used it as an anchoring point for reflection on theater and dramatic poetry. In different ways, they came to see _Hamlet_ a work that captured the dynamics of modern life, especially its emphasis on interpretation, relativism, and the threat of nihilism. The changing attitudes toward _Hamlet_ reflect, in turn, a changing attitude toward interpretation and understanding, as these topics are addressed in Shakespeare’s work _and_ in eighteenth-century aesthetics and philosophy more broadly speaking.

From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically significant notions of force, organism, and life. As such, Herder’s contribution is taken to be part of a wider eighteenth-century effort to move beyond Newtonian mechanism and the scientific models to which it gives rise. In this scholarship, Herder’s hermeneutic philosophy—as it grows out of his engagement with poetry, drama, and both literary translation and literary documentation projects—has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.

Within the context of German idealism, the notion of _Bildung_ is often led back to G. W. F. Hegel’s _Phenomenology of Spirit_. This paper argues that an alternative notion of _Bildung_ is developed, a few years earlier, in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Both Schleiermacher and Hegel develop their notions of _Bildung_ with reference to Fichte’s philosophy. However, whereas Hegel’s understanding of _Bildung_ reflects his interest in the gradual self-understanding of humanity (Spirit), Schleiermacher takes his point of departure in the diversity of individuals within a given context of cultural and linguistic mediation; whereas Hegel is committed to the idea that historical development will, at some point, reach a point of culmination, Schleiermacher’s philosophy is driven by the notion of education and self-understanding as an ongoing exercise. This chapter suggests that both these notions of _Bildung_ must be ascribed some value—within the specific systematic framework in which they occur and with regard to a wider philosophical discussion of _Bildung_ as such. Only if we take into account the romantic as well as the Hegelian understanding of _Bildung_ can we arrive at an adequate notion of _Bildung_.

Written in the 1780s, when slavery was a hotly debated issue in France, Germaine de Staël’s Mirza, or Letter from a Traveler addresses topics such as enslavement, free trade, freedom, and the relationship between Europe and Africa. When the author, nine years later, decided to publish the novella, it was accompanied by Essay on Fictions, a veritable manifesto for an engaged, philosophical literature. However, in the scholarship, Mirza is typically treated independently of Staël’s aesthetic manifesto. The present paper seeks to overcome this shortcoming. It shows how her early abolitionist novella sheds light on her moral psychology – particularly her discussion of greed – but also on her philosophy of literature.

The tradition of philosophical hermeneutics does not offer a definitive answer to the question “What is truth?” and the inquiry into the relationship between truth and interpretation. Instead, it presents a number of ways in which this question can be asked and discusses the validity and relevance of some plausible responses. Modern hermeneuticians emphasize the interpretative nature of human thought and existence. For Heidegger and Gadamer, truth concerns the way we lead our lives. Dilthey and Nietzsche contemplate the role of the human sciences in a landscape of shifting historical and cultural horizons, arriving at quite different conclusions with respect to the possibility of truth and objectivity. Events and symbolic expressions are products of human intentions and desires, and must be understood as such. For Dilthey, this dimension of meaning is, so to speak, the imprint of human historicity.

The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche offers a new interpretation of Henrik Ibsen’s drama and brings to light new aspects of G. W. F. Hegel’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s works, especially their theorizing of drama and theater. This study emphasizes the centrality of philosophy of theater in nineteenth-century philosophy and demonstrates how drama functions as an artform that offers insight into human historicity and the conditions of modern life. In this way, The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche seeks to deepen and actualize the relationship between philosophy and drama—not by suggesting that either philosophy or drama should have the upper hand, but by indicating how a sustained dialogue between them can bring out the best in both.

The long Nineteenth Century spans a host of important philosophical movements: romanticism, idealism, socialism, Nietzscheanism, and phenomenology, to mention a few. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx are well-known names from this period. This, however, was also a transformative period for women philosophers in German-speaking countries and contexts. Their works are less well-known, yet offer stimulating and path-breaking contributions to nineteenth-century thought. In this period, women philosophers explored a wide range of philosophical topics and styles. Throughout the movements of romanticism, idealism, socialism, and phenomenology, women philosophers helped shape philosophy's agenda and provided unique approaches to existential, political, aesthetic, and epistemological questions. While during the Nineteenth Century women continued to be (largely) excluded from formal education and positions, they developed ways of philosophizing that was accessible, intuitive, and activist in spirit. The present volume makes available to English-language readers--often for the first time--the works of nine significant women philosophers, with the hope of stimulating further interest in and scholarship on their works. The Editors' introductions offer a comprehensive introduction to the contributions of women philosophers in the period, but also to individual figures and movements. The translations are furnished with explanatory footnotes and are designed to be accessible to students as well as scholars.

The Drama of History plumbs the rich relationship between drama and philosophy. Kristin Gjesdal offers a lively and accessible discussion of the philosophical aspects of Henrik Ibsen's work. She shows how well-known nineteenth-century philosophers such as Hegel and Nietzsche develop their thoughts in interaction with the dramatic arts. At the heart of this interaction is a shared interest in exploring the existential condition of human life as lived andexperienced in history. In this sense, Gjesdal engages philosophy's capacity beyond its narrow academic confines.

This collection of fifteen newly commissioned essays has a dual purpose. Through an emphasis on the reception of Spinoza in German nineteenth-century thought, the volume seeks to shed new light on his work. Likewise, the focus on Spinoza’s influence in the long nineteenth century illuminates novel aspects of the philosophical lineage from idealism to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and beyond. The contributions are at the cutting edge of research on modern German philosophy, not only when it comes to canonical figures like Herder, Kant, and Marx, but also philosophers whose importance has since been neglected such as Salomon Maimon and Lou Salomé. The volume will be of interest to, among others, scholars working in the history of philosophy, in intellectual history, and in Jewish, religious, and German studies.

ABSTRACT This article, a version of which was presented in January 2020 to the North American Nietzsche Society at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting, is a commentary on Andrew Huddleston's 2019 monograph, Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture. While praising Huddleston's balancing of systematic and critical scholarship, the article also takes up the wider framework in which Nietzsche's contribution should be understood and the possible limitations to his philosophical contribution.

Since its publication in 1890, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler has been a recurring point of fascination for readers, theater audiences, and artists alike. Newly married, yet utterly bored, the character of Hedda Gabler evokes reflection on beauty, love, passion, death, nihilism, identity, and a host of other topics of an existential nature. It is no surprise that Ibsen's work has gained the attention of philosophically-minded readers from Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salome, and Freud, to Adorno, Cavell, and beyond. Once staged at avant-garde theaters in Paris, London, and Berlin, Ibsen is now a global phenomenon. The enigmatic character of Hedda Gabler remains intriguing to ever-new generations of actors, audiences, and readers. Hedda Gabler occupies a privileged place in the history of European drama and as a work of literature, and, as this volume demonstrates, invites profound and worthwhile philosophical questions. Through ten newly commissioned chapters, written by leading voices in the fields of drama studies, European philosophy, Scandinavian studies, and comparative literature, this volume brings out the philosophical resonances of Hedda Gabler in particular and Ibsen's drama more broadly.

_Debates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy _offers an engaging and in-depth introduction to the philosophical questions raised by this rich and far reaching period in the history of philosophy. Throughout thirty chapters (organized into fifteen sections), the volume surveys the intellectual contributions of European philosophy in the nineteenth century, but it also engages the on-going debates about how these contributions can and should be understood. As such, the volume provides both an overview of nineteenth-century European philosophy and an introduction to contemporary scholarship in this field.

In the young Henrik Ibsen's intellectual quarters, abroad as well as in his native Norway, Hegelianism was very much the philosophical systemde rigueur. Hegel's student Marcus Jacob Monrad taught phenomenology and aesthetics at the University of Christiania throughout the 1850s, and promoted a wider Hegelian way of thinking through frequent book reviews and newspaper articles. In Italy, soon to be his home away from home, Ibsen socialised with the art-historian Lorentz Dietrichson, whose views on the history of art were outspokenly Hegelian. Ibsen was also in touch with the Hegelian circle gathering around the painter I. C. Dahl at the Academy of Art in Dresden. While Ibsen rarely engages in explicit philosophical discussion, he makes a significant exception when responding to the Danish translation of John Stuart Mill'sUtilitarianism. He admits that he has no professional expertise in this area but continues to observe that, insofar as ‘there are writers [like Mill] who lay down the law about philosophy without any knowledge of Hegel or German thought in general,’ it seems to him that ‘anything is allowed.’ To think philosophically without Hegel appears to Ibsen as tantamount to thinking without a reference point or standard.

Hermeneutics, the study of interpretation, is an essential and valuable branch of philosophy. Hermeneutics is also a central component of the methodology of the social sciences and the humanities, for example historiography, anthropology, art history, and literary criticism. In a sequence of accessible chapters, contributors across the human sciences explain the leading concepts and ideas of hermeneutics, the historical development of the field, the importance of hermeneutics in philosophy today, and the ways in which it can address contemporary concerns including intercultural relations, relations between subcultures within a single society, and relations across race and gender. Clearly structured and written in non-technical language, this Companion will be an important contribution to a growing field of study.

Among Edvard Munch’s many portraits of Henrik Ibsen, the famous Norwegian dramatist and Munch’s senior by a generation, one stands out. Large in scope and with a characteristic pallet of roughly hewed gray blue, green and yellow, the sketch is given the title Geniuses. Munch’s sketch shows Ibsen, who had died a few years earlier, in the company of Socrates and Nietzsche. The picture was a working sketch for a painting commissioned by the University. While Munch, in the end, chose a different motif for his commission, it is nonetheless significant that he found it appropriate to portrait the Norwegian dramatist in the company of key European philosophers, indeed the whole span of the European philosophical tradition from its early beginnings to its most controversial spokesman in the late 1800s. In my article, I seek to take seriously Munch’s bold and original positioning of Ibsen in the company of philosophers. Focusing on Hedda Gabler—a play about love lost and lives unlived—I explore the aesthetic-philosophical ramifications of Ibsen’s peculiar position between realism and modernism. This position, I suggest, is also reflected in Munch’s sketches for the set design for Hermann Bahr’s 1906 production of the play.

The philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer interests a wide audience that spans the traditional distinction between European and Anglo-American philosophy. Yet one of the most important and complex aspects of his work - his engagement with German Idealism - has received comparatively little attention. In this book, Kristin Gjesdal uses a close analysis and critical investigation of Gadamer's Truth and Method to show that his engagement with Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher is integral to his conception of hermeneutics. She argues that a failure to engage with this aspect of Gadamer's philosophy leads to a misunderstanding of the most pressing problem of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics: the tension between the commitment to the self-criticism of reason, on the one hand, and the turn towards the meaning-constituting authority of tradition, on the other. Her study provides an illuminating assessment of both the merits and the limitations of Gadamer's thought.

Through a detailed study of Herder's Enlightenment thought, especially his philosophy of literature, Kristin Gjesdal offers a new and sometimes provocative reading of the historical origins and contemporary challenges of modern hermeneutics. She shows that hermeneutic philosophy grew out of a historical, anthropological, and poetic discourse in the mid-eighteenth century and argues that, as such, it represents a rich, stimulating, and relevant engagement with the potentials and limits of human meaning and understanding. Gjesdal's study broadens our conception of hermeneutic philosophy - the issues it raises and the answers it offers - and underlines the importance of Herder's contribution to the development of this discipline. Her book will be highly valuable for students and scholars of eighteenth-century thought, especially those working in the fields of hermeneutics, aesthetics, and European philosophy.