Continental Philosophy Research Group Talk (Espen Hammer, Temple)

The Continental Philosophy Research Group is pleased to welcome Espen Hammer, professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Temple University. Dr. Hammer’s main interests are in Kant and German idealism, social and political philosophy, modern European philosophy, phenomenology, critical theory, and aesthetics. He has previously held professorships at the University of Oslo (Norway) and University of Essex (UK), and visiting professorships at the New School for Social Research and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Frankfurt.

Dr. Hammer will be also be holding a workshop on his recently published After the Death of God: Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kant to Nietzsche(University of Chicago Press, 2025) ) earlier on this Friday, April 4, from 10 AM-12 PM, in JHB 401.

Talk Title

The Greening of Critical Theory

Talk Abstract

In the paper I discuss the prospects for developing or reconstructing an ecological awareness within the tradition of critical theory. While both the Marxian background of early critical theory and Habermas’s discourse theory prove to be ethically and morally anthropocentric and thus insufficiently equipped to generate a persuasive critique of our relationship to nature, there are resources in Adorno’s philosophy, outlining a form of experiential moral realism, that prove more promising. I examine and defend those.

About the Continental Philosophy Group

One of six departmental research interest groups, the Continental Philosophy Group works in the traditions of textual interpretation of human consciousness, phenomenology, and post-structuralist critical theory, among other related traditions of thought.