I am a historian of post-Kantian European philosophy. I am interested in historicity, transcendental principles, abstraction, social domination and ecological destruction.

Current research:

The Critique of Abstraction in Early Critical Theory

Abstraction is a powerful tool that allows us to disregard particularities in order to focus on general characteristics and patterns. Abstraction is also dangerous: what if by abstracting, we lose touch with the complexity and individuality of real beings?

My research uncovers a strand in Critical Theory and Western Marxism that is organized around the critique of abstraction. Authors such as Lukács, Adorno, Horkheimer, Sohn-Rethel, Lefebvre and Postone analyse and critique capitalism as a mode of social organization in which people are ruled by abstractions.

I am interested in the idea that some processes of abstraction do not occur in thought, but in the real world: value, the commodity, money, and capital are abstractions, and yet they are real and powerful social institutions. I am also exploring what it means to be “ruled” by abstractions, and more specifically, how in capitalism, the domination of some groups of people by others is mediated by abstract social forms.

Engaging in a historical study that situates central authors of Critical Theory and the Marxist tradition in the context of earlier (Hegelian, Romanticist, neo-Kantian, and sociological) critiques of abstraction, I hope to clarify how this line of critique relates to other, better understood, critiques of capitalism that are formulated in terms of exploitation, reification and (class-)domination.

Reification and Agency in the Age of Ecological Breakdown

It is a recurring trope in contemporary ecological thought that Western capitalist modernity entails a “reification of nature.” This reification is seen to be, at least partly, responsible for the breakdown of the earth’s climate- and ecosystems that we are beginning to live through. Consequently, the rejection of reified, mechanistic conceptions of nature, and their replacement with a language of “agency” and “co-productions” has become prevalent in critical ecological thought.

My research investigates the history of the central concepts and assumptions that underpin these discussions. It seeks to gain a clearer understanding of what it means to “reify” nature, how social reification is related to the capitalist organization of nature, and whether the concept of “agency” is appropriate, and sufficient, for addressing and countering phenomena of reification. The project is motivated by the suspicion that in placing the emphasis on “agency,” ecological thought may inadvertently reproduce the anthropocentric and productivist ideologies that it seeks to counter.

Past research:

Neo-Kantianism and Historicism. Historical Method and the Problem of Relativism in 19th Century German Philosophy

The past is distant in two ways. First, it is not directly empirically observable. What happened in the past needs to be inferred from written documents and other remains. Second, the beliefs and values embraced by past cultures might differ radically from what we believe and value today. Given the dual distance of the past, how is historical knowledge possible? What methods allow us to adequately reconstruct and understand the past?

Serious engagement with history tends to evoke the spectre of relativism. If historical research shows all life and culture, and even the results of science, to be subject to throughgoing historical transformations, does it follow that all systems of belief and value are only valid relative to their historical context? Or is there something universal that underpins historical change, and that makes understanding past cultures possible?

My research studies how thinkers associated with the “return” to Kant’s transcendental philosophy in the nineteenth century – Windelband, Rickert, Cohen, and Cassirer – encountered these questions. It explores how they thought about historical method and knowledge, how they took up ideas from the hermeneutic and historicist traditions (Herder, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Ranke, Droysen), and how they responded to the problem of historical relativism. My aim is to demonstrate that questions concerning history and historical method were an integral component of neo-Kantian philosophizing, and a central driver in the debates on the philosophy-science relation at the time. As the neo-Kantians historicized abstractions and a priori conditions, they developed novel conceptions of objectivity and validity.