European Philosophy
European philosophy is a traditional focus of the Northwestern Department of Philosophy. We currently have particular strength in German philosophy from Kant to the present and in 20th century and contemporary French philosophy.
Northwestern offers a research opportunity in the Program in Critical Theory. For more information, click here.
Core Faculty
(Philosophy): German philosophy (esp. Hegel), existentialism, ethics, social and political philosophy
(Philosophy): 20th century and contemporary French philosophy (esp. Foucault and Derrida), Nietzsche, feminist philosophy and gender theory, poststructuralist theory, biopolitics
(German): German literature and philosophy, contemporary French thought (Kant, Kierkegaard, Derrida, Benjamin)
(Philosophy): German philosophy, particularly hermeneutics and critical theory (Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas); contemporary moral and political philosophy, philosophy of language
(Philosophy): Kant; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics; the nineteenth-century German philosophical tradition, with special interest in Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Hegel
Additional Faculty
Philosophy faculty with a strong secondary interest in European philosophy:
(Philosophy): Moral theory, political philosophy, Kant, History of ethics
(Philosophy): Philosophy of logic and mathematics, forerunners of and early analytic philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language, and mind, philosophy of religion, Kant.
(Philosophy): Philosophy of science, American pragmatism, philosophy of language in the analytic tradition, Kant
Additional Northwestern faculty with special interests in European Philosophy
(French and Italian): French, German, and American modernities, interactions between East Asian and Euro-American modernisms; intellectual and cultural history, aesthetics, avant-gardes, translation, media. Teaching concentrations in Derrida, Hegel, Marx
(French and Italian): 20th- and 21st-century literature, film, and theory, with particular emphasis on Foucault and Deleuze, as well as the Marxist critical tradition
(Law): Political, Moral, and Legal Philosophy; Corporate Criminal Law; Jurisprudence; Criminal Law and Procedure; Legislation; Philosophy of Law
Sam Weber
(German): Critical Theory, Derrida, Freud, Lacan, Frankfurt School, Benjamin