Curtis Bowman

Advertisements for Myself - #12

In mid-2007 I agreed to work as one of the translators of an anthology of the work of the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. These things take time to see the light of day, and so only recently has the book been published by Brandeis Universty Press.

The book is entitled Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible and includes a wide selection of Mendelssohn's work from 1769 to 1786. Michah Gottlieb edited, introduced, and annotated the book. Elias Sacks did the translations from Hebrew, and I did the new translations from German. I also made some suggestions for slightly revising the excerpts from Allan Arkush's 1983 translation of Mendelssohn's Jerusalem.

My new translations make up roughly forty percent of the book as a whole. This page will provide you with the full table of contents. I translated selections 1-3, 5, 6-8, 10, 11-13, 15-16, and 20-25.

Advertisements for Myself - #11

I haven't blogged much for the past couple of years, but I intend to change that. If you go to my academic autobiography and scroll down to the latest installment, you'll see that I've had some health issues that have gotten in the way of my work in general, and not just my blogging. But I've been feeling better recently, and so I should be doing more with my blog from now on. At least that's my hope.

Advertisements for Myself - #10

From time to time over the past few years I've mentioned that Yolanda Estes and I have been working on a book about the German philosopher J.G. Fichte. It's been a long haul, but it now looks as if J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798-1800) will be published in March 2010. Our book is a collection of translations and commentary devoted (as the title plainly indicates) to Fichte and the atheism dispute, a pivotal event not only in Fichte's philosophical career but also in the history of German idealism as a whole.

The complete manuscript is at the press, and so right now Yolanda and I are working through the production process. This page on the Ashgate website will give you more information about the book and its contents.

Advertisements for Myself - #9

In early 2006 I wrote a 500-word entry about Benjamin Christensen's Häxan for Steven Schneider's BFI anthology 100 European Horror Films. The book is also available in the U.S. under the same title.

If you don't know about Häxan, then I recommend that you see it. It's one of the strangest of silent horror films, since it's really more of a documentary essay than a drama, although it contains dramatic illustrations of the European witch craze. There's also a didactic aspect to the film. Benjamin Christensen, the director, was familiar with the psychiatry and psychoanalysis of his day, and he attempts to demonstrate that the origin of the belief in witches and witchcraft has a psychological explanation rooted in the phenomenon of hysteria.

For my entry I made use of the DVD available through the Criterion Collection. As far as I know, that's the only version to be found in the U.S. Unfortunately, I don't know what other editions might be available outside of the U.S.

Advertisements for Myself - #8

About a year and a half ago I wrote a review of Nicholas Royle's The Uncanny (Routledge, 2003). My piece is finally available, and you can find it here.

Because I have an interest in horror film and gothic literature, I've spent some time studying Freud's famous essay on the uncanny. I even taught it in a class on tragedy and horror that I gave a few times at Bryn Mawr College. (Here's the syllabus for the final version of that class.)

Several years ago I published an essay entitled "Heidegger, the Uncanny, and Jacques Tourneur's Horror Films" in a book entitled Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror. There I contrast Freud's concept of the uncanny with (of all things) Heidegger's concept of the uncanny as it appears in Being and Time, and then I apply the latter concept to Jacques Tourneur's horror films, that is, to Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and Curse of the Demon.

If you think that my essay would interest you, send me an email and I'll send you a PDF in return.

Advertisements for Myself - #7

I've mentioned from time time that one of my philosophical interests is the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. A little over three years ago I agreed to write a chapter on Fichte's Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge for a volume to be published by Acumen Publishing.

These things take a while to come to fruition, of course, and so I only recently received my advance copy of volume three of Central Works of Philosophy, a projected five-volume series edited by John Shand.

The idea behind the chapter was to produce a reading of Fichte's most influential book that would be of help to students approaching that formidable text for the first time. I think, though, that more advanced readers will also find the chapter useful.

If you happen to have access to an academic library, please encourage the librarians to purchase the entire series.

Advertisements for Myself - #6

Some readers of this blog already know that I used to be a philosophy professor, but that I'm now an independent scholar. From time to time I receive emails from readers asking me what it's like to be an independent scholar, inquiring about my current projects, and so forth. The easiest way to get an answer to these questions is to read my academic autobiography.

I began this autobiographical essay in 1999, and from time to time I revise and expand it. I updated it recently, adding material about the past several months. It's become fairly long by now — roughly 9500 words. If you're interested in the sad state of academia nowadays, or if you're considering going to graduate school, then you might want to take a look at what I've written. At the very least, though, it will explain to you why I became an independent scholar.

Update - February 17, 2006: If you go to this post, you'll find some autobiographical remarks relating to my time in academia. The post as a whole is dedicated to the issue of whether or not to go to graduate school.

Advertisements for Myself - #5

Ten years ago Paul Guyer, Fred Rauscher, and I began work on volume 13 of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Our plan was to translate and annotate a generous selection of material that was published after Kant's death — marginalia, sketches, drafts, and the like.

Our volume — Notes and Fragments — took a long time to finish, but today I finally received my advance copies, and the press tells me that the book will soon be available through the normal channels. This page contains all of the relevant information for anyone interested in purchasing the book.

Advertisements for Myself - #4

Several years ago I wrote an entry on Johann Gottlieb Fichte for The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fichte is one of my scholarly interests, as I've mentioned from time to time.

I've been putting the finishing touches on a book chapter about Fichte, and so I thought that I should revise my encyclopedia entry to reflect my current thinking. The updated version is now on-line.

Advertisements for Myself - #3

In October 1996 I gave a lecture on the Frankfurt School — "Odysseus and the Siren Call of Reason: The Frankfurt School Critique of Enlightenment" — at the University of Pennsylvania. Vance Bell, editor-in-chief of Other Voices, expressed an interest in publishing the text of my lecture in the first issue of his e-journal. I agreed, and the text of my lecture has been available on-line ever since.

My lecture is devoted to the first two chapters of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Over the years I've received emails from readers who wanted to express their gratitude at finding something that helped them to make sense of at least a part of that puzzling book. I kept these emails in mind as I continued to teach the book, and then I decided that the first book that I would try to write would be a commentary on Dialectic of Enlightenment. Those emails had convinced me that there would be an audience for the book that I wanted to write.

Well, for several years many things got in the way. Now that I'm now an independent scholar, I have time to take up my project in earnest. I'm working on a proposal to send to an editor who is interested in my project. I thought, though, that I should make a few revisions to the text of my lecture. I cleaned up the punctuation a little bit, deleted a few irrelevant passages, added some small clarifications, and the like. I also added a postscript dated February 2005.

As my book project progresses, I'll post updates about it to my blog.