Independent Researcher

About

I have two distinct but overlapping sets of interests: the intellectual history of the “long” eighteenth century and the philosophy of history. I am especially interested in the emergence of modernity as a distinct moral and conceptual phenomenon. In my dissertation, “Sparta in the Enlightenment” (currently in the development hell of being turned into a book), I argue that the eighteenth-century controversy about the legitimacy of using ideals inspired by the myth of ancient Sparta to criticize contemporary European civilization was a manifestation of the growing consciousness of modernity, which culminated in the rejection of appeals to the past and the reimagining of the future as open and unbounded.

Lately I'm more interested in the philosophical aspects of my work, so nowadays I say I am concerned above all with how people think about the past, what they think about it, and why they think how and what they do. I find fascinating the ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical foundations of the study of the past. That is, such questions as what the past is and where it is, how we can have knowledge about it, and what sorts of obligations the past entails upon its students acting as moral agents in the present. I've also become quite interested in time, not just in philosophy of time issues like presentism, eternalism, and the growing block (and trying to figure out which of those makes the most sense for historians to adhere to); but time in general, the way humans perceive it, experience it, understand it, evade and embrace it, and so on.

If I have one eye now on more philosophical considerations, the other remains fixed on issues in eighteenth-century intellectual history, such as the nature and meaning of the category “the Enlightenment,” when it began, whether it was one or many, what its characteristic features were, and how, when, and why it waned and was submerged by newer intellectual currents. The political thought of the eighteenth century looms large in my work, notably liberalism, republicanism, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism, as well as the two great political movements of the era, the American and French Revolutions, and the role of history therein. Eighteenth-century concepts of fame and celebrity have recently started drawing my attention, too. I also remain engaged with eighteenth-century historiography and philosophies of history.

Another thing that fascinates me is cultural reprsentations of the past. By this I don’t mean how history is portrayed in books and movies, or not mostly that. Rather, I mean how the past functions as an object and source of conflict and struggle in fiction, how protagonists and antagonists seek either to escape the past or reclaim it, how they cope with the temporality and time-boundedness of their existence. Amidst its innumerable absurdities and non sequiturs postmodernism did yield one great insight, the affinity (but not identity) of history and fiction as forms of narrative, i.e., stories which unfold through time. To think in and of time is one of the defining characteristics of the human mind. In a real sense, then, the study of man's representations of his relationship to the past is one of the most revelatory of ways by which we may learn what it means to be human.