Curtis Bowman's Homepage
It looks as if J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798-1800) will be published in March 2010. Yolanda Estes and I have been working on this volume of translations and commentary for several years. As the title indicates, the book is devoted 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. Our completed manuscript is at the press. Right now we're working through the production process. This page on the Ashgate website will give you more information about the book and its contents.
This site contains information about my scholarly interests and pursuits, including a copy of my CV and a few details of some of my projects. Separate pages are devoted to the syllabi for my classes.
My academic autobiography might be of interest to some visitors, especially to any undergraduates who are thinking about going to graduate school. It starts with my years as an undergraduate and covers the next twenty-five years or so of my life. I post an update roughly every couple of years.
Three of my public lectures are available on-line. The first is about Kant's relationship to the Enlightenment, especially his indebtedness to Rousseau. The second looks at the first two chapters of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. The third is a paper on Fichte that I presented at a conference in 1999.
Cambridge University Press has published Notes and Fragments, volume 13 of the Cambridge Kant edition. Paul Guyer, Fred Rauscher, and I began the work on this translation project in 1995. It was finally published in 2005. Yes, it took ten years. Kant scholars are a persistent bunch. It has something to do with having maxims, I think.
In the fall of 2002 I published an article on Georges Franju's film Eyes Without a Face in Kinoeye. I wrote another, much longer essay on horror film entitled "Heidegger, the Uncanny, and Jacques Tourneur's Horror Films." It appeared in the fall of 2003 in an anthology entitled Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror.
In January 2005 I published a review of Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience, and in May 2007 I published a review of Nicholas Royle's The Uncanny. These two reviews relate in certain ways to my interest in horror film, as should become apparent to you as you read them. In early 2006 I wrote a 500-word entry about Benjamin Christensen's Häxan for Steven Schneider's BFI anthology 100 European Horror Films.
On my Fichte page you'll find links to two book reviews, an encyclopedia entry, and a conference paper that all deal with the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
About three years ago I published a chapter on Fichte's Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge. Although it's meant primarily as an aid to readers approaching that obscure work for the first time, I think that more advanced students of Fichte will also find it helpful.
From 1997 to 2009 I was webmaster for the North American Fichte Society. The site now was a new home at http://digilib.bu.edu/nafs/. There you'll find a great deal of information about current Fichte studies around the world.
I also maintain a blog devoted to politics and culture. There you will find, among other things, my review of Marc Bousquet's How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. You'll also find my review of Simon Blackburn's Truth: A Guide.
This page last modified on August 25, 2009.