I am an Alexander von Humboldt (Feodor Lynen) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, and have just completed my PhD at the University of Stuttgart, on thought and nature in Hegel. During my PhD I was a visiting researcher at Stanford and Yale; earlier I studied philosophy, classics, German, and comparative literature at Cologne and Bonn.
What interests me most is a question I keep returning to: what does it take for thought to reach all the way down into being? Whereas in my PhD, I tackled this question with regard to our scientific and philosophical accounts of nature, in my postdoc, I follow the same question into Kant’s critique and Hegel’s rehabilitation of the ontological argument. Kant holds that existence is no real predicate or determination of things, so no concept can entail the existence of its object. But Hegel relocates the proof inside the self-determination of what he calls the concept: existence isn’t something that could satisfy a concept or thought externally. Rather, it’s what thought, fully determined, truly is. I don’t take this rehabilitation to be a step back behind Kant — it’s, thought thoroughly, his consequence.