I am an incoming Alexander von Humboldt (Feodor Lynen) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, and have just completed my doctorate at the University of Stuttgart, on thought and nature in Hegel. During the doctorate I was a visiting researcher at Stanford and Yale; earlier I studied philosophy, classics, German, and comparative literature at Cologne and Bonn.
My work is in logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of nature, above all in Kant and Hegel. The dissertation, Die Verwandlung der Natur, reconstructs the systematic unity of these three in Hegel’s encyclopaedia, reading his replacement of metaphysics by logic not as pre-critical dogmatism but as a radicalization of Kant. A modal-metaphysical proof of nature’s necessary existence is the bridge: nature is an existence-condition of the logical — the domain in which logical form is freely realized.
The postdoctoral project turns to Kant’s critique and Hegel’s rehabilitation of the ontological argument. Where Kant holds that existence is no real predicate, so that no concept can entail the being of its object, Hegel relocates the proof within the self-determination of the concept itself: being is not added to thought from without, but is what thought, fully determined, already is. The wager is that this rehabilitation is not a relapse behind Kant, but his consequence.