James Conant

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James Ferguson Conant (born June 10, 1958 in Kyoto ) is an American philosopher .

Life

James Conant - a grandson of chemist James Bryant Conant - received his BA in Philosophy and the History of Science in 1982 from Harvard College , Cambridge , Massachusetts . In 1990 he received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University . From 1991 to 1999 Conant served on the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Pittsburgh . Since 2000 he has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago . In the 2004 summer semester, Conant took on a visiting professorship at the University of Potsdam . Since December 2012 co-director of the Analytical German Idealism (FAGI) research college at Leipzig University . In 2017, Conant was appointed to an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship at the University of Leipzig. He is also the director of the Chicago Center for German Philosophy (CCGP). The FAGI and the CCGP form the main axis of an international philosophical network that spans Germany, Israel and the United States.

Researches

Conant's research encompasses the philosophy of language and epistemology as well as the philosophy of mind and aesthetics . His related interest in the history of philosophy relates on the one hand to Kant and German idealism , on the other hand to the analytical philosophy of Gottlob Frege , Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle .

In the research on Wittgenstein's philosophy Conant is one of those to the group philosopher, a resolute reading ( resolute readings represented). The group, which arose under the influence of the philosopher Cora Diamond , opposes a standard interpretation . The methodological-hermeneutical guiding principle of this reading is rather the basic assumption that a middle ground is required between the two extremes of an exclusively historical-philological approach and an instrumentalization for systematic purposes. A resolute reading seeks - starting from the original text - for contributions by the historically involved author Wittgenstein for the current understanding of philosophical problems. In the context of Wittgenstein research, Conant examined the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in his method and specifically the central concept of logical syntax .

In addition to Frege, Conant's work on analytical philosophy also deals with Rudolf Carnap and Bertrand Russell . Here he included a critical discussion of Russell's type theory . In this context it is of particular interest that Conant shows a line of development that leads from Kant's Transcendental Logic via Frege's conception of logic to the early Wittgenstein. Conant published this evidence in 1991 in the article The Search for Logically Alien Thought .

Another research focus of Conant is the history of analytical philosophy . In 2017, in collaboration with Jay Elliott, on the Norton Anthologies Series, he edited After Kant: The Analytic Tradition , which spans the span of the analytic tradition in philosophy from its beginnings to the present.

Harvard University Press published the 1,100-page volume The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics (Ed .: Sofia Miguens) in 2020 . The volume brings together comments on Conant's The Search for Logically Alien Thought (1991) by eight well-known philosophers: Jocelyn Benoist, Matthew Boyle, Martin Gustafsson, Arata Hamawaki, Adrian Moore, Barry Stroud, Peter Sullivan and Charles Travis - followed by replies by Conant.

Award

Publications

English
  • The Logical Alien: Conant and his Critics , Harvard University Press, 2020
  • The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy: After Kant , with Jay Elliott. WW Norton & Co, 2017.
  • On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely: Reply to Meredith Williams and Peter Sullivan. Together with Cora Diamond. In: M. Kölbel, B. Weiss (Eds.) The Lasting Significance of Wittgenstein's Philosophy . Routledge 2004
German
  • Friedrich Nietzsche. Perfectionism and Perspectivism . Konstanz University Press, Konstanz 2014, ISBN 978-3-86253-042-7 .
  • Limits of the language. A sketch of Wittgenstein's late review of the Tractatus . Hans Julius Schneider, Carl Friedrich Gethmann (Ed.): XXI. German Congress for Philosophy . Akademie Verlag, Leipzig 2011
  • Absorption. The ontology of a feature film world . In: History of German Studies . German Literature Archive Marbach , 2009
  • What is pragmatism ? In: Richard Raatzsch (Ed.): Wittgenstein Yearbook 2003 .
  • Can our cognitive faculties reach the objects by themselves? In: Marcus Willaschek, Marie-Louise Raters (ed.): Hilary Putnam and the tradition of pragmatism . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2002
  • Freedom, Truth and Cruelty: Rorty and Orwell . In: Rainer Born, Otto Neumaier (Hrsg.): Philosophy Science - Economy. Think together - learn from one another . öbv & hpt Verlagsgesellschaft, Vienna 2001, pp. 75–94, ISBN 3-209-03805-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Directors | FAGI Leipzig. Retrieved September 24, 2018 (American English).
  2. ↑ University of Leipzig Press Release 278/2016 of 27 October 2016: More Humboldt Professorship for the University of Leipzig. Philosopher James Conant Can Be Cited , NN , accessed October 27, 2016
  3. ↑ Executive Board | Center for German Philosophy. Retrieved September 24, 2018 (American English).
  4. ↑ Conant, James; Elliott, Jay: The Norton anthology of western philosophy: after Kant . First ed. New York 2017, ISBN 978-0-393-92907-2 .
  5. ^ Sofia Miguens: The logical alien: Conant and his critics . 2020, ISBN 978-0-674-33590-5 ( worldcat.org [accessed February 19, 2020]).
  6. ↑ Alexander von Humboldt Professorship - James Conant. Retrieved September 24, 2018 .

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Conant, James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Conant, James Ferguson (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Kyoto