Contact details
- Name:
- Dr Johan Siebers
- Qualifications:
- Doctorate (Philosophy), Leiden University; MA (Philosophy), Radboud University Nijmegen
- Position/Fellowship type:
- Associate Fellow
- Institute:
- Institute of Modern Languages Research
- Home institution:
- Middlesex University London
- Location:
- Institute of Modern Languages Research University of London Senate House Malet Street London WC1E 7HU
- Phone:
- +44 7809 469 795
- Email address:
- johan.siebers@sas.ac.uk
- Website:
- http://sas.academia.edu/JohanSiebers/About
Research Summary and Profile
- Research interests:
- Culture, Language and Literature (German), Literatures in a modern language, Philosophy
- Summary of research interests and expertise:
-
My main research interest is in philosophy as an intellectual and existential activity sui generis, its history and its relations to other disciplines and other modes of thought, expression and activity. My research is motivated by the investigation of the relation between discursive reasoning and intuition. My earlier interest, from this perspective, in American and especially process philosophy (The Method of Speculative Philosophy: An Essay on the Foundations of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, Leiden 1998) gradually shifted to a focus on critical theory, German philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries and in particular the utopian thought and writing of Ernst Bloch (also a process philosopher). I have published numerous articles and other contributions on Bloch’s philosophy (e.g. in B. Dietschy et al., Bloch-Wörterbuch: Leitbegriffe der Philosophie Ernst Blochs, De Gruyter 2012 or P. Thompson and S. Žižek, The Privatisation of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia, Duke University Press 2013. I am the founding editor of Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication and this area of research remains an interest. Recurrent themes, topics and keywords in my work are: process, event, temporality, futurity, novelty and utopia; art, culture and creativity; philosophy and literature; community and communism; hope; the thinking of being and ontological difference; truth; voice and courage; philosophical and speculative method; the unsayable, intuition, affect, questioning and non-conceptual thinking; the unconscious; identity, totality and the absolute; the relation between philosophy and daily life; philosophical wonder; transcending without transcendence; the other side of European nihilism. In the near future I hope to add comparative philosophy as a field of research, especially regarding the history of German philosophy and Daoism.
I am available to supervise doctoral or MA/MPhil theses in these and related areas.
- Project summary relevant to Fellowship:
I lead the Ernst Bloch Centre at the Institute of Modern Languages Research and convene the German Philosophy Seminar.
- Publication Details
- Relevant Events
-
Related events:
Date Details Ernst-Bloch-Gesellschaft The EBG organises annual conferences and other events; we also publish the Jahrbuch der Ernst-Bloch-Gesellschaft (Königshausen & Neumann).
Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication The journal Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication publishes work at the interface of philosophy and communication theory.
Temporal Belongings The AHRC funded Temporal Belongings research network brings together researchers interested in the relation between temporality and community.
German Philosophy Seminar podcasts Via the above link you can access many of the German Philosophy Seminars I have held at the IMLR.