Eckart Förster

Eckart Förster (born January 12, 1952, in Bremen) is a German philosopher and university lecturer. He taught as a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and as an honorary professor at Humboldt University in Berlin until becoming emeritus on January 1, 2021.

He has published primarily on Kant and German Idealism as well as on Goethe's thought on natural science (Naturwissenschaft). His book ''25 Years of Philosophy'' (2011), in which he traces why Kant saw himself at the beginning of the history of philosophy and why Hegel considered it to be finished with his work 25 years later, received much attention. He was awarded the Kuno Fischer Prize of the University of Heidelberg for this book in 2017. He has also published on Kant's ''Opus postumum'' (English edition with commentary 1993), Goethe's philosophy of science, the Pythagorean tradition and Hölderlin.

Biography

Förster studied from 1971 to 1973 at the Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology in Frankfurt am Main (Philosophicum 1973), from 1973 to 1976 philosophy in Frankfurt and from 1976 at the University of Oxford with a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1979 (Prolegomena to a Theory of Transcendental Arguments) and a doctorate in 1982 (Kant and the Problem of Transcendental Arguments) under Peter Strawson. From 1980 to 1982 he was lecturer at Balliol College in Oxford, from 1982 to 1983 lecturer at Harvard University and from 1983 to 1996 professor at Stanford University (1983 assistant professor, 1990 associate professor, 1996 full professor), both in the Department of Philosophy and German Studies. In 1996, he became a full professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Chair II as successor to Dieter Henrich), which he remained until 2003. From 2001 to 2020 he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University. From 2004 to 2020, he was also an honorary professor at Humboldt University Berlin.

He was a visiting professor at Princeton University in 1988/89, at the Federal University of Porto Alegre in Brazil in 1998, at Ohio State University in 1999 (Max Kade visiting professor) and at New York University in 2022 (Eberhard Berent Goethe Chair).

In 1976 he became a Rhodes Scholar. He received the Ernest Walker Prize in Philosophy from Balliol College in 1979 and was a Fellow of the Stanford Humanity Center in 1987. In 1992 he received the Peter and Helen Bing Award for Excellence in Teaching at Stanford University. In 2005 he was a Guggenheim Fellow.

From 1998 he was a member of the Jacobi Commission and in 2000 of the Schelling Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and from 2001 to 2012 of the Kant Commission of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Writings

Books:

* ''Die 25 Jahre der Philosophie''. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2011, 3. Auflage 2018.
** Englische Ausgabe: ''The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy'', Harvard UP 2012, 2. Auflage 2017 (Japanische Ausgabe 2021, Koreanische und Türkische Ausgaben sind in Vorbereitung)
** Dazu erschien ein Essay Band: ''Übergänge – diskursiv oder intuitiv? Essays zu Eckart Försters "Die 25 Jahre der Philosophie",'' Hrsg. Johannes Haag und Markus Wild. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2013.
* ''Kant's Final Synthesis''. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
* ''Reflexionen des Geistes in Philosophie und Kunst''. Dornach: Verlag am Goetheanum, 2021.
* ''Grenzen der Erkenntnis?'' Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog 2022.
* Herausgeber und Übersetzer (mit Michael Rosen): ''Kant's Opus postumum'', Cambridge UP 1993
* Herausgeber: ''Kant's Transcendental Deductions. The Three Critiques and the Opus postumum'', Stanford UP 1998
* Herausgeber mit Yitzhak Y. Melamed: ''Spinoza and German Idealism'', Cambridge UP 2012

Essays:

* ''Is there a gap in Kant's critical system?'' In: ''Journal of the History of Philosophy'', Band 25, 1987, S. 533–555
* ''Kant's Refutation of Idealism'', in: A. J. Holland (Hrsg.): ''Philosophy, its History and Historiography'', Dordrecht: Reidel 1985, S. 287–303
* ''Fichte und der Atheismusstreit von 1799'', in Venanz Schubert (Hrsg.): ''Welt ohne Gott? Theoretischer und Praktischer Atheismus'', St. Ottilien: Eos Verlag 1999, S. 65–84
* ''Kant's Metaphysikbegriff'', in: Dieter Henrich, Rolf-P. Horstmann, ''Metaphysik nach Kant''? Klett-Cotta 1988, S. 123–136
* ''Kant's Selbstsetzungslehre'', in: Eckart Förster (Hrsg.): ''Kant's Transcendental Deductions. The Three Critiques and the Opus postumum'', Stanford University Press, 1989, S. 217–238.
* ''To lend wings to physics once again. 'Hölderlin and the Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism'', in: ''European J. of Philosophy,'' Band 3, 1995, S. 174–198
* ''Was darf ich hoffen? Zum Problem der Vereinbarkeit von theoretischer und praktischer Vernunft Bei Immanuel Kant'', in: ''Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung'', Band 46, 1992, S. 169–189
* ''Die beiden Vorreden der KrV'', in: G. Mohr, M. Willaschek (Hrsg.): ''Kooperativer Kommentar zu Kants Kritik der Reinen Vernunft'', Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1998, S. 37–55
* ''Da geht der Mann dem wir alles verdanken! Eine Untersuchung zum Verhältnis Goethe/Fichte'', in: ''Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie'', Band 45, 1997, S. 1–14
* ''Die Wandlungen in Kants Gotteslehre'', in: ''Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung,'' Band 52, 1998, S. 341–362
* ''Die Bedeutung von §76, 77 der Kritik der Urteilskraft für die Entwicklung der nachkantischen Philosophie'', 2 Teile, in: ''Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung'', Band 56, 2002, S. 169–190, 322–345
* ''Hegels Entdeckungsreisen'', in: Klaus Vieweg, Wolfgang Welsch (Hrsg.): ''Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes'', Suhrkamp 2008, S. 37–57
* ''Kant und Strawson über ästhetische Urteile'', in: Jürgen Stolzenberg, ''Kant in der Gegenwart'', de Gruyter 2007, S. 269–289, (englisches Original in H.-J. Glock, Strawson and Kant, Clarendon Press 2003)
* ''Der Deutsche Idealismus aus der Sicht der USA'', in: ''Jahrbuch der Japanischen Hegel-Gesellschaft,'' Band 13, 2007, S. 115–123
* ''Goethe als Philosoph'', Die Drei, Band 78, 2008, S. 9–19
* ''Goethe und die Idee der Naturphilosophie'', in: Jonas Maatsch, ''Morphologie und Moderne. Goethes anschauliches Denken in den Geistes- und Naturwissenschaften seit 1800,'' De Gruyter 2014, S. 43–56

He is the author of the articles Jacob Sigismund Beck in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Hölderlin in Metzler Lexikon Religiöser Denker (2000) and Gadamer in the Fontana Biographical Compendium of Modern Thought as well as contributions to the Kant-Lexikon (ed. Marcus Willaschek et al., de Gruyter 2015).

He was editor of essays on Hölderlin by Dieter Henrich (''The course of remembrance and other essays on Hölderlin'', Stanford UP 1997).

External links

*

Eintrag der Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, hier auch ein Verzeichnis seiner weiteren Publikationen
*

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Förster, Eckart
1952 births
Academic staff of the Humboldt University of Berlin
Johns Hopkins University faculty
21st-century German philosophers
20th-century German philosophers
Living people
Hegel scholars