Reader in the History of the European Enlightenment

Contact Details

So naturally does the past take precedence, so pervasive is the cognitive reflex to historicize whatever happens, it seems that any general theory of knowledge must start with a critical theory of historical knowledge. But theory here does not imply anything abstract, anything governed by pre-emptive conceptualizations. Rather it defaults to reality, to the only premise knowledge has, to what Marx in The German Ideology calls ‘real, active human beings and their real life-process ’. Suspending the idea that history is an academic activity sui generis, it analyzes the preoccupation with history as a social practice, the significance of it as a social fact. It offers a phenomenology of history-focussed behaviour. This, the premise of Historics (2006), is further developed in Imprisoned by History (2010).

Research

• Research Interests 
• Publications

PhD Supervision

Historics: the philosophy and theory of history; the nature of historical knowledge; European-Jewish philosophy/cultural criticism since Moses Mendelssohn; European Enlightenment and its contemporary implications; and European cultural theory and criticism since the Enlightenment.

Teaching

My teaching covers these main areas: the history of ideas since the 18th century; modern European-Jewish cultural and social theory; critical theory of historical knowledge.

Undergraduate modules include:

• People and Places: Kafka and Prague
• Historical Knowledge: Its Social and Political Uses
• What is Enlightenment? The Problem of Enlightenment in Modern European Thought (including texts by Moses Mendelssohn, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, Michel Foucault)
• The Age of the Masses (including texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, Émile Durkheim, Georges Sorel, Sigmund Freud, Ortega y Gasset).

Postgraduate modules include:

• Contributions to the MA Humanities core course (covering texts by Hannah Arendt and Edward Said)
• Core methodology module on the nature of historical knowledge for the MA in History

Administrative Responsibilities

• Second Year Senior Tutor
• Member of the School Progress Committee
• Member of the School Undergraduate Student/Staff Committee
• Admissions Team
• Erasmus Co-ordinator

Most Recent Publications

1. Imprisoned by History. Aspects of Historicized Life (New York: Routledge, 2010) , xiii + 259pp.
2. Historics: Why History Dominates Contemporary Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), xii + 287pp.
3. Identity or History? Marcus Herz and the End of the Enlightenment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), xiv + 344pp.