Kristin Gjesdal
Temple University, Philosophy Department, Faculty Member
- My areas of specialization include German Idealism, nineteenth-century Philosophy, phenomenology, and hermeneutics (f... moreMy areas of specialization include German Idealism, nineteenth-century Philosophy, phenomenology, and hermeneutics (from Herder and Schleiermacher to Gadamer, Davidson, and beyond). I also have an interest in philosophy and tragedy and have written on the philosophical reception of Sophocles and Shakespeare, as well as on Henrik Ibsen.
I am currently working on two book-length projects: The first, preliminary entitled “Unruly Women: Romantics and Revolutionaries,” explores social and political philosophy from Germaine de Staël to Rosa Luxemburg. The second, “The Imperative of Interpretation: Herder, Schleiermacher, Staël,” studies the development of modern hermeneutics from the point of view of concrete political and cultural challenges.
I studied philosophy at the University of Oslo and have been a visiting scholar at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, and Columbia University, as well as a post-doctoral Fulbright Fellow at the University of Chicago and a Humboldt Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin. In the fall of 2023 I was a Distinguished Anderson Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney.
I have published some fifty journal articles and book chapters. My Gadamer and the Legacy of Idealism appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2009/2011, Herder's Hermeneutics: History, Poetry, Enlightenment was published in 2017/2019 (also with Cambridge), and The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche in 2021 (with Oxford UP). I have edited The Oxford Handbook to German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (with Michael Forster, OUP, 2015) and Key Debates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy (Routledge 2015). I am also the editor of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler: Philosophical Perspectives (OUP, 2018) and the Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics (with Michael Forster, forthcoming with CUP). With Dalia Nassar, I have edited Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition (Oxford UP, 2019) and The Oxford Handbook of Ninteenth-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition (2024). I am an area editor (nineteenth-century philosophy) for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and on the Editorial Board of The European Journal of Philosophy, Journal for New Narratives in the History of Philosophy (JNNHP), Journal of Transcendental Philosophy, and a number of European Journals and book series.
For more information, papers etc., see my webpage:
https://sites.temple.edu/kristingjesdal/edit
Research Interests: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Literature, Continental Philosophy, Applied Drama/Theatre, and 7 moreModern Drama, Literature and Philosophy, Drama and Theater, 19th and 20th-century European philosophy, Henrik Ibsen, Post-Kantian European Philosophy, and European Literature and History of Ideas In the 20th Century
Research Interests: Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Norwegian Literature, Henrik Ibsen, European modernism. Expressionism in Drama. August Strindberg. Henrik Ibsen. Scandinavian Film and Media. Cinema Studies. Architecture and Spatiality. Crime Fiction. Stieg Larsson. Gender and Women's Studies., and 3 moreTheater and Performance Studies, Philosophy and Theater, and research on Modernism and drama
Kristin Gjesdal's The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche is a rich exploration of Hegelian and Nietzchean themes in and through Ibsen's work. Ibsen (1828-1906) was born shortly before Hegel's death (1831) and was a contemporary of... more
Kristin Gjesdal's The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche is a rich exploration of Hegelian and Nietzchean themes in and through Ibsen's work. Ibsen (1828-1906) was born shortly before Hegel's death (1831) and was a contemporary of Nietzsche (1844-1900). 1 Some of Ibsen's best-known plays-A Doll's House, Ghosts, The Wild Duckpremiered during Nietzsche's most active period of philosophical writing. Gjesdal's book is also a window onto Hegel's and Nietzsche's 19th-century reception in Scandinavia, and their place in literary and artistic circles. That said, Gjesdal's book is not just about charting influence. This makes the study especially interesting and philosophically rich. It asks 'what hermeneutic-artistic possibilities were disclosed by the philosophical contributions at the time and how Ibsen, as an artist, makes use of and often goes beyond them' (3). Gjesdal reads the plays as taking up Hegelian and Nietzschean themes, yet complicating and challenging them, in such a way as not only to have Hegel and Nietzsche shed light on Ibsen but also to have Ibsen shed light on Hegel and Nietzsche. Two of the plays Gjesdal discusses will be less familiar to most audiences: The Vikings at Helgeland (1858) and Emperor and Galilean (1873), both works treating historical themes. It is Ibsen's bourgeois dramas, set in the Norway of roughly his time, that tend to be the popular stage mainstays now. The folkloric Peer Gynt (1867) is likely somewhere in between, in terms of familiarity. The Vikings at Helgeland takes place in the 10th century and draws, as its name would suggest, on the Saga literature. The 19th century was a period of great interest in mythology, with this thought to be a route to better understand and make sense of one's identity and of the values that ground one's community. During the same period as Ibsen was writing, Richard Wagner was at work on his monumental tetralogy, Der Ring des Niebelungen, which also drew on Norse mythology. This turn to mythology came on the heels of the Sturm und Drang movement, in which these historical evocations of the past played an important role as well. Gjesdal allows that the play is, to some extent, a mythologizing endeavour and an expression of Sturm und Drang sentiments. But it is, on her reading, not simply a backward-looking play, but one that speaks to our modern condition (32). It is indeed as though its central character Hjørdis faces the predicament of the modern subject: 'Her world is god-forsaken, her very self, her identity and self-understanding, emerges as hollow in the tradition she had previously taken for granted' (33). The turn towards the mythic, and attempts at dramatizing this, were in the 19th century also part and parcel of the attempt to demarcate and solidify distinct national identities. This, again, was a centrepiece of the Wagnerian
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This chapter explores the contributions of nineteenth-century women to social and political thought. Focusing on the works of Germaine de Staël, Karoline von Günderrode, Bettina Brentano von Arnim, Hedwig Dohm, Clara Zetkin, and Rosa... more
This chapter explores the contributions of nineteenth-century women to social and political thought. Focusing on the works of Germaine de Staël, Karoline von Günderrode, Bettina Brentano von Arnim, Hedwig Dohm, Clara Zetkin, and Rosa Luxemburg, it makes visible the important philosophical arc from early romanticism to late nineteenth-century socialism. The chapter concludes with a brief re ections on the legacy of these movements and how they contribute to the shaping of phenomenology and later twentieth-century thought. The contributions of women philosophers in the long nineteenth century-the period between German idealism and romanticism, on the one hand, and early phenomenology, on the other-span a range of topics and areas. In this period, women contribute to epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of science, philosophy of nature, philosophy of anthropology, feminism, philosophy of the human, and other areas. Yet, if one were to try and o er a lens through which these contributions are connected-not an umbrella concept under which they can be subsumed, but a looser commitment around which constellations gather with variation in distance and overlap-it would be this: social and political philosophy. Women philosophers in this period had been raised (and raised themselves) to be intellectuals. Yet a position within academia-where campus architecture, book collections, and student communities mark a concrete commitment to the life of the mind-was denied them. They were excluded from the discourse
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One might get the impression from writing in contemporary aesthetics that sculpture and the distinctive philosophical questions it raises have received scant attention. This was not, however, always the case. In the eighteenth and early... more
One might get the impression from writing in contemporary aesthetics that sculpture and the distinctive philosophical questions it raises have received scant attention. This was not, however, always the case. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sculpture was seen as key to a philosophical understanding of art. A point in case is Hegel’s position. As Hegel argues, sculpture is not simply one art form among many. It holds a privileged place in that it showcases the very essence of art. In developing this argument, Hegel is often seen to lean on Winckelmann and his cultivation of classical sculpture. However, Winckelmann’s influence on Hegel has often been misunderstood. Winckelmann does not support a naïve classicist view of ancient sculpture. Instead, he sees sculpture as the art of embodiment and views this embodiment in historical terms. Hegel, in turn, takes over and further develops each of these arguments. This aspect of Winckelmann’s philosophy of art—and, for that sake, of Hegel’s—is of fundamental importance for our understanding of nineteenth-century aesthetics, whether in respect to its development, systematic commitments, or its relevance today.
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Within the context of German idealism, the notion of Bildung is often led back to G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This paper argues that an alternative notion of Bildung is developed, a few years earlier, in the work of... more
Within the context of German idealism, the notion of Bildung is often led back to G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This paper argues that an alternative notion of Bildung is developed, a few years earlier, in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Both Schleiermacher and Hegel develop their notions of Bildung with reference to Fichte’s philosophy. However, whereas Hegel’s understanding of Bildung reflects his interest in the gradual self-understanding of humanity (Spirit), Schleiermacher takes his point of departure in the diversity of individuals within a given context of cultural and linguistic mediation; whereas Hegel is committed to the idea that historical development will, at some point, reach a point of culmination, Schleiermacher’s philosophy is driven by the notion of education and self-understanding as an ongoing exercise. This chapter suggests that both these notions of Bildung must be ascribed some value—within the specific systematic framework in which they occur and with regard to a wider philosophical discussion of Bildung as such. Only if we take into account the romantic as well as the Hegelian understanding of Bildung can we arrive at an adequate notion of Bildung.
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The purpose of this chapter is to ask how Gadamer, in Truth and Method, deals with the challenge of relativism in historical thought and how he responds to the issues brought up by the constellation of philosophers he labels historicists.... more
The purpose of this chapter is to ask how Gadamer, in Truth and Method, deals with the challenge of relativism in historical thought and how he responds to the issues brought up by the constellation of philosophers he labels historicists. I argue that Gadamer misunderstands both historicism and the relativist challenges to which it responds. This double misunderstanding will shape his hermeneutic contribution in unwanted ways (including his notions of tradition and second nature to which Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, and other anglophone philosophers have recently turned).
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Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics represents a response to relativism. In working out his position, Gadamer by and large follows the phenomenological path staked out in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. This chapter critiques Gadamer’s... more
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics represents a response to relativism. In working out his position, Gadamer by and large follows the phenomenological path staked out in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. This chapter critiques Gadamer’s response to relativism and suggests that hermeneutics will do better if it also considers the resources offered by pre-Heideggerian phenomenology, especially the work of Edith Stein.
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In German eighteenth-century culture, Shakespeare’s work was translated, staged, and discussed with a passion that has remained unrivaled. Philosophy was no exception to this trend. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Lessing,... more
In German eighteenth-century culture, Shakespeare’s work was translated, staged, and discussed with a passion that has remained unrivaled. Philosophy was no exception to this trend. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Lessing, Herder, and Schlegel all turned to Shakespeare’s work and used it as an anchoring point for reflection on theater and dramatic poetry. In different ways, they came to see Hamlet a work that captured the dynamics of modern life, especially its emphasis on interpretation, relativism, and the threat of nihilism. The changing attitudes toward Hamlet reflect, in turn, a changing attitude toward interpretation and understanding, as these topics are addressed in Shakespeare’s work and in eighteenth-century aesthetics and philosophy more broadly speaking.
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Among Edvard Munch’s many portraits of Henrik Ibsen, the famous Norwegian dramatist and Munch’s senior by a generation, one stands out. Large in scope and with a characteristic pallet of roughly hewed gray blue, green and yellow, the... more
Among Edvard Munch’s many portraits of Henrik Ibsen, the famous
Norwegian dramatist and Munch’s senior by a generation, one stands out. Large in scope and with a characteristic pallet of roughly hewed gray blue, green and yellow, the sketch is given the title Geniuses. Munch’s sketch shows Ibsen, who had died a few years earlier, in the company of Socrates and Nietzsche. The picture was a working sketch for a painting commissioned by the University. While Munch, in the end, chose a different motif for his commission, it is nonetheless significant that he found it appropriate to portrait the Norwegian dramatist in the company of key European philosophers, indeed the whole span of the European philosophical tradition from its early beginnings to its most controversial spokesman in the late 1800s. In my article, I seek to take seriously Munch’s bold and original positioning of Ibsen in the company of philosophers. Focusing on Hedda Gabler—a play about love lost and lives unlived—I explore the aesthetic-philosophical ramifications of Ibsen’s peculiar position between realism and modernism. This position, I suggest, is also reflected in Munch’s sketches for the set design for Hermann Bahr’s 1906 production of the play.
Norwegian dramatist and Munch’s senior by a generation, one stands out. Large in scope and with a characteristic pallet of roughly hewed gray blue, green and yellow, the sketch is given the title Geniuses. Munch’s sketch shows Ibsen, who had died a few years earlier, in the company of Socrates and Nietzsche. The picture was a working sketch for a painting commissioned by the University. While Munch, in the end, chose a different motif for his commission, it is nonetheless significant that he found it appropriate to portrait the Norwegian dramatist in the company of key European philosophers, indeed the whole span of the European philosophical tradition from its early beginnings to its most controversial spokesman in the late 1800s. In my article, I seek to take seriously Munch’s bold and original positioning of Ibsen in the company of philosophers. Focusing on Hedda Gabler—a play about love lost and lives unlived—I explore the aesthetic-philosophical ramifications of Ibsen’s peculiar position between realism and modernism. This position, I suggest, is also reflected in Munch’s sketches for the set design for Hermann Bahr’s 1906 production of the play.
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Among Edvard Munch’s many portraits of Henrik Ibsen, the famous Norwegian dramatist and Munch’s senior by a generation, one stands out. Large in scope and with a characteristic pallet of roughly hewed gray blue, green and yellow, the... more
Among Edvard Munch’s many portraits of Henrik Ibsen, the famous Norwegian dramatist and Munch’s senior by a generation, one stands out. Large in scope and with a characteristic pallet of roughly hewed gray blue, green and yellow, the sketch is given the title Geniuses. Munch’s sketch shows Ibsen, who had died a few years earlier, in the company of Socrates and Nietzsche. The picture was a working sketch for a painting commissioned by the University. While Munch, in the end, chose a different motif for his commission, it is nonetheless significant that he found it appropriate to portrait the Norwegian dramatist in the company of key European philosophers, indeed the whole span of the European philosophical tradition from its early beginnings to its most controversial spokesman in the late 1800s. In my article, I seek to take seriously Munch’s bold and original positioning of Ibsen in the company of philosophers. Focusing on Hedda Gabler—a play about love lost and lives unlived—I expl...
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The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. Malpas and Gander (London: Routledge, 2014).
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Within the field of European literature, it would be no exaggeration to suggest that the twentieth century begins with the modernist pantheon of the late 1800s. Philosophy follows in due course, and asks how modernist literature, with its... more
Within the field of European literature, it would be no exaggeration to suggest that the twentieth century begins with the modernist pantheon of the late 1800s. Philosophy follows in due course, and asks how modernist literature, with its stylistic earnest, its attacks on bourgeois morality, and its relentless will to transcend existing literary conventions can yield a unique perspective on modern life. Sometimes the development of new forms reinforces the value of more traditional literature. In its different forms and permutations, Marxist philosophy theorizes the relationship between literature and society, be it with reference to the realist novel or the modernist work of art. It looks at how literature can voice the contradictions of modern life and point beyond existing societal forms by offering glimpses of a worthy, human existence. Within a French context, phenomenological and Marxist approaches to literature converge in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
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From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically... more
From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically significant notions of force, organism, and life. As such, Herder’s contribution is taken to be part of a wider eighteenth-century effort to move beyond Newtonian mechanism and the scientific models to which it gives rise. In this scholarship, Herder’s hermeneutic philosophy—as it grows out of his engagement with poetry, drama, and both literary translation and literary documentation projects
—has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.
—has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.
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“Modern Values” discusses the relationship between Ibsen’s drama and Hegel’s philosophy of art. With a focus on A Doll’s House, it shows how Ibsen, along Hegelian lines, investigates the costs of ahistorical and aestheticizing mindsets.... more
“Modern Values” discusses the relationship between Ibsen’s drama and Hegel’s philosophy of art. With a focus on A Doll’s House, it shows how Ibsen, along Hegelian lines, investigates the costs of ahistorical and aestheticizing mindsets. In this way, he brings out the relevance of Hegel’s critique of naïve, romanticizing attitudes. However, with his determination to develop drama beyond its late romantic instantiations, Ibsen also points beyond the limitations of Hegel’s understanding of art.