Peter Gordon (historian)
Peter Eli Gordon (born 1966) is an American intellectual historian. The Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University, Gordon focuses on continental philosophy and modern German and French thought,[2] with particular emphasis on the philosopher Martin Heidegger, continental philosophy during the interwar crisis, and most recently, secularization and social thought in the twentieth century.[3]
Peter Gordon | |
---|---|
Born | Peter Eli Gordon 1966 (age 54–55) Seattle, Washington, US |
Other names | Peter E. Gordon |
Years active | 1998–present |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Thesis | Under One Tradewind[1] (1997) |
Doctoral advisor | Martin Jay |
Academic work | |
Discipline | History |
Sub-discipline | Intellectual history |
Institutions | Harvard University |
Main interests | |
Notable works | Continental Divide (2010) |
Website | scholar |
Early life
Born in Seattle, Washington,[4] in 1966, Peter Gordon was the son of Sunnie and Milton Gordon. Milton Gordon (1930-2005) was a biochemist who attended University of Minnesota and the University of Illinois,[5] earning his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree at 23 and joining the faculty at the University of Washington in 1959, focusing on plant genetics.[6][7] Peter Gordon received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Reed College (1988) after a stint at the University of Chicago. He studied with Martin Jay at University of California, Berkeley, from which he received his PhD degree (1997).[4]
Career
Gordon spent two years (1998–2000) at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2000.[2] In 2006 he became a member of Harvard's permanent faculty, and in 2005 he received the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching.[8]
Gordon's first book, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (University of California Press, 2003), about Martin Heidegger and the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig,[9][10][11] won the Salo W. Baron Prize from the Academy for Jewish Research for Best First Book, the Goldstein-Goren Prize for Best Book in Jewish Philosophy, and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for Best Book in Intellectual History.[2]
In Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard University Press, 2010), Gordon reconstructs the famous 1929 debate between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at Davos, Switzerland, demonstrating its significance as a point of rupture in Continental thought that implicated all the major philosophical movements of the day.[12][13][14][15] Continental Divide was awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society in 2010.[16]
Gordon's most recent monograph, Adorno and Existence (Harvard University Press, 2016), reinterprets Theodor W. Adorno's philosophy by looking at the critical theorist's encounters with existentialism and phenomenology. The main claim of the book is that Adorno was inspired by the unfulfilled promise of these schools to combat traditional metaphysical thinking, which led to the development of his "negative dialectics".[17][18][19]
Gordon sits on the editorial boards of Modern Intellectual History, The Journal of the History of Ideas, and New German Critique. He is co-founder and co-chair of the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History.[20] Gordon regularly teaches two survey courses on continental philosophy: German Social Thought and French Social Thought.
Selected publications
- Authoritarianism (co-authored with Wendy Brown and Max Pensky, University of Chicago Press, 2018)
- Adorno and Existence (Harvard University Press, 2016)
- Weimar Thought: A Critical History (co-editor with John McCormick, Princeton University Press, 2013)
- Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard University Press, 2010)
- “What Hope Remains?” in The New Republic on Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secularist Age and Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, et al., The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere.
- "The Guilty" in The New Republic on Deborah Lipstadt's The Eichmann Trial (New York: Schocken (Nextbook), 2011)
- "Up from Zerio Hour" in The New Republic on Matthew Spector's Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
- Gordon's review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews on Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in 1933. Michael B. Smith, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)
- "Helter Skelter, German Style" in The New Republic on Hans Kundnani's Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2009)
- “The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age” Journal of the History of Ideas Volume 69, Number 4 (October, 2008), pp. 647–673.
- “The Artwork Beyond Itself: Adorno, Beethoven, and Late Style” in The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Intellectual History and Critical Theory in Honor of Martin Jay (co-editor with Warren Breckman, et al., Berghahn Books, 2008)
- “Neo-Kantianism and the Politics of Enlightenment” Philosophical Forum (Spring, 2008)
- “The Concept of the Unpolitical: German Jewish Thought and Weimar Political Theology” Social Research. Special Issue on Hannah Arendt's Centenary Volume 74, Number 3 (Fall 2007)
- The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (co-editor with Michael Morgan, Cambridge University Press, 2007)
- “Hammer without a Master: French Phenomenology and the Origins of Deconstruction (or, How Derrida read Heidegger)” in Histories of Postmodernism, Mark Bevir, et al., eds. (Routledge, 2007)
- “Science, Realism, and the Unworlding of the World” in The Blackwell Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, Mark Wrathall and Hubert Dreyfus, Eds. (Blackwell, 2006)
- "Continental Divide: Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos, 1929—An Allegory of Intellectual History," Modern Intellectual History. Vol. I, N. 2, (August, 2004), pp. 1–30.
- Rosenzweig and Heidegger, Between Judaism and German Philosophy (University of California Press, 2003)
References
- Gordon, Peter Eli (1997). Under One Tradewind: Philosophical Expressionism from Rosenzweig to Heidegger (PhD thesis). Berkeley, California: University of California, Berkeley. OCLC 39670935.
- "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2012-04-14. Retrieved 2012-04-23.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
- "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2012-05-11. Retrieved 2012-04-23.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
- "A Brief Biography". Harvard University. Retrieved 2018-10-04.
- Skolnik, Sam (2005-08-22). "Milton P. Gordon: UW professor was a pioneer in plant genetics". Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Retrieved 2018-10-04.
- "UW Biochemistry - Faculty - Milton Gordon". depts.washington.edu. Retrieved 2018-10-04.
- Gordon, Peter E. (2018-10-01). "Lenny Boy". Boston Review. Retrieved 2018-10-04.
- Evan H. Jacobs (May 9, 2005). "History's Gordon Tenured".
- Leventhal, Robert S. (June 2005). "Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy.(Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, number 33.)". The American Historical Review. 110 (3): 886–887. doi:10.1086/ahr.110.3.886. ISSN 0002-8762.
- Sheppard, Eugene R. (2006-07-13). "Three Questions for Peter Eli Gordon on his book: Introduction". Jewish Quarterly Review. 96 (3): 385–386. doi:10.1353/jqr.2006.0034. ISSN 1553-0604.
- Braiterman, Zachary (November 2005). "Peter Eli Gordon. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003. 357 pp". AJS Review. 29 (2): 405–407. doi:10.1017/S0364009405440179. ISSN 1475-4541.
- Isaacs, Alick (2013-05-11). "Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos by Peter E. Gordon (review)". Common Knowledge. 19 (2): 393–394. doi:10.1215/0961754X-2073649. ISSN 1538-4578.
- McGrath, Larry (2011). "Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (review)". MLN. 126 (5): 1140–1144. doi:10.1353/mln.2011.0085. ISSN 1080-6598.
- Wolin, Richard (2012-04-01). "Peter E. Gordon. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2010. Pp. xiv, 426. $39.95". The American Historical Review. 117 (2): 598–600. doi:10.1086/ahr.117.2.598-a. ISSN 1937-5239.
- Winters, David (2012). "Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos". Radical Philosophy. 172: 61.
- "Search Results | Harvard University Press".
- Pippin, Robert. "Robert Pippin reviews Adorno and Existence". Critical Inquiry. Retrieved October 4, 2018.
- Bowie, Andrew (2017-07-12). "Adorno and Existence by Peter E. Gordon (review)". Journal of the History of Philosophy. 55 (3): 550–551. doi:10.1353/hph.2017.0064. ISSN 1538-4586.
- Hietalahti, Jarno (2017-09-12). "Adorno and Existence". Phenomenological Reviews. Retrieved 2018-10-04.
- "The Harvard Colloquium".
External links
- Peter Gordon's Faculty Page
- Peter Gordon's bio at Harvard's Center for European Studies
- The Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History
- Gordon's brief introduction to intellectual history, "What is Intellectual History?"