Book · June 2022
Like Pfau's previous book, Minding the Modern, Incomprehensible Certainty is a major work. With over fifty illustrations, the book will interest students and scholars of philosophy, theology, literature, and art history. ...
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Journal ArticleChristianity and Literature · September 1, 2021
Both of us teach in the Duke English Department and hold secondary appointments in the Duke Divinity School. In this essay, we reflect on impediments to teaching Christian literature in contemporary English departments, in particu-lar the naturalistic, ant ...
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Chapter · November 23, 2020
My essay opens with a brief review of Husserl's 1905 lectures on "Phantasie und Bildbewusstsein. " It then moves on to consider how, in his short monograph on Rodin and the letters on Cezanne, Rilke develops a phenomenology of image experience that complem ...
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Journal ArticleModern Theology · January 1, 2019
Rilke’s impact on the generation of writers reshaping philosophy and theology during the interwar years is arguably without parallel. Within this constellation, the case of Heidegger as a reader of Rilke presents unique challenges. For Rilke’s poetry neith ...
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Book · January 1, 2013
Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of hum ...
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Journal Article · September 18, 2012
This article looks at literary theory. It locates that problematic integral in modernity's dramatically altered experience and conception of time. While the centrality of time to modern theory is hardly in doubt, an acutely temporal dimension also shapes e ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2012
A distinguishing feature of Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is its striking reversal of emphasis, away from the Humean drama of volatile and non-cognitive passions and toward reaffirming the continuity of a more settled kind of affect. In an attempt at ...
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Journal ArticleEuropean Romantic Review · October 1, 2010
This essay scrutinizes the narrative logic of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1796), widely regarded as the most paradigmatic instance of the European Bildungsroman. Of particular concern is whether the formal and psychological self-organization ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2010
Während sich nun diese [romantische] Schule ihrem Ableben näherte, veränderte sich mehr und mehr die Physiognomie der Zeit. Die Revolution, der Liberalismus, die Technik, die materiellen Tendenzen, die Cultur, die Alles beleckt, die Philosophie, die den le ...
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Journal ArticleEighteenth Century · January 1, 2010
This essay explores the revival of ancient conceptions of "judgment" in Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise. In contrast to the reductionist and potentially irrational thrust of "decision" and "opinion" in modern political theory (e.g., Carl Schmitt), Aristotel ...
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Journal ArticleEuropean Romantic Review · April 1, 2008
This essay critiques the concept of the punctual or autonomous self that served as the foundation of classical liberalism and its moral philosophy, beginning in the work of A. Smith, T. Paine, and I. Kant. Grounded in the language of rights, personal liber ...
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Journal ArticleEuropean Romantic Review · April 1, 2007
This essay sketches the antithesis between a teleological and a variational model of development (Bildung) in nineteenth-century thought, with a particular focus on narrative. I argue that, in the course of that century, the initially dynamic logic of Bild ...
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Book · 2005
The study studies mostly lyric forms as imaginative encryptions of Romanticism’s changing political, economic, and cultural conditions. The study correlates paranoia, trauma, and melancholy with discrete phases of British and German Romanticism. Figures ce ...
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