Curtis Bowman's Homepage
This site contains information about my scholarly interests and pursuits, including a copy of my CV and a few details of my latest 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, which began in 1981, and goes on to cover the subsequent thirty years of my life. I post an update every few 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. Just in case you have trouble with the website, which has problems sometimes, here's a PDF (187 KB) of my article.
I also wrote a 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. Here's a PDF (40 KB) of it as well.
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. And in early 2009 I wrote the entries for "Kiss of Death" and "Gun Crazy" in Steven Schneider's 101 Gangster Movies You Must See Before You Die.
In 2006 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.
In 2010 Yolanda Estes and I finally published J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798-1800). 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.
In 2007 I began working on translations for a Moses Mendelssohn's reader that finally saw the light of day in October 2011. The book is called Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, and was edited by Michah Gottlieb and translated by Curtis Bowman, Elias Sacks, and Allan Arkush. All of the new translations from German are mine and make up about forty percent of the book's contents. Gottlieb and I made some small revisions to the excerpts from Arkush's 1983 translation of Jerusalem. Sacks did all the new translations from Hebrew.
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. I haven't done much with my blog during the past couple of years, but I'm hoping to get back to it in the near future.
This page last modified on April 11, 2013.