Jon Stewart (philosopher)

Life

Stewart earned his BA in Philosophy in 1984 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studied with David Hoy and Robert Goff. He received his MA in 1986 and his PhD in 1992 from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Henry Allison, Nicholas Jolley, Robert B. Pippin and Frederick A. Olafson. His dissertation was entitled The Transition from “Consciousness” to “Self-Consciousness” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

Stewart did research for his dissertation at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in 1989-90. There he worked together with Ludwig Siep. From 1990-91 Stewart had a research assistantship at the same university, where he was an assistant for Jürgen-Gerhard Blühdorn. After completing his dissertation in the spring of 1992 Stewart returned to Münster with a postdoctoral grant.

From 1993-94 Stewart had a grant to do post-doctoral research at the Université Libre in Brussels (where he worked with Marc Richir) and at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium. Stewart received another postdoctoral grant, which allowed him to pursue his research from 1994-95 at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, where he worked with Volker Gerhardt.

In 1996 Stewart was awarded a two-year postdoctoral grant from, what was then, the newly created Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen. This grant was extended and eventually turned into a permanent post. In 2003 he defended his Habilitation thesis at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen. In 2005 he was Guest Professor at the Philosophy Department, at the University of Iceland. In 2007 he completed a second Habilitation thesis, this time in Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. In the same year he was elected into the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. In 2008-2009 Stewart received a fellowship to work at the Collegium Budapest, Institute for Advanced Study. In 2010 he was Guest Professor at the Philosophy Department at the Universidad de los Andes, Santiago de Chile. He has also had several research stays at the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota (2006, 2011, 2012).

Stewart has done much to internationalize and globalize Kierkegaard research by developing close contacts with scholars in Central and Eastern Europe, the Nordic countries, Latin America, the USA, Asia and Australia. In 2011 he founded The International Kierkegaard Society as a forum for communication for Kierkegaard students and scholars from around the world. He has helped to organize numerous conferences, seminars, translation projects and Kierkegaard societies in many different countries. He has given more than 100 lectures at universities in some 20 different countries.

Academic work

Stewart is best known for his work in the fields of German idealism, existentialism, philosophy of religion, and Hegel and Kierkegaard studies. He has also done much to make the philosophy and culture of the Danish Golden Age better known internationally. His work is broadly interdisciplinary, touching on fields such as philosophy, religious studies, literature, history and Scandinavian Studies. His philosophical corpus includes research monographs, translations and editorial work. He is also known as an organizer and administrator of major research projects.

Monographs

Stewart's first book, entitled The Unity of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Systematic Interpretation (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press) appeared in 2000. The subject of the book is a traditional problem in Hegel studies, concerning the unity of Hegel's book The Phenomenology of Spirit. The long-term trend in Hegel studies has been to regard Hegel’s remarks about the systematic nature of his philosophy as simply indefensible. In contrast to this Stewart argues that this view tends to obscure a good deal with respect to different analyses of Hegel's work and thought, since it takes them out of their larger context from which they ultimately derive their meaning and in which they were intended to be understood. In this way Stewart aims to understand the Phenomenology as a part of a larger philosophical system and as a coherent and unified philosophical work in its own right.

Stewart’s second book, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003) marked a major shift in Kierkegaard studies; and was widely reviewed in academic journals, as well as by a Danish newspaper. Before this book, a particular view of the relationship between Hegel and Kierkegaard had dominated most of the secondary literature (a view which was largely due to the influence of the Danish scholar Niels Thulstrup). In a series of articles and above all his influential book Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel (trans. by George L. Stengren, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980) Thulstrup presented what became the orthodox view of Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel. Thulstrup’s main claim was that Kierkegaard has nothing whatsoever in common with Hegel. This view was profoundly influential in the secondary literature, and was taken up uncritically by a number of scholars of nineteenth-century European philosophy.

Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered challenges this standard view as over-simplistic. Stewart shows that when one examines Kierkegaard’s works carefully, one finds that his relation to Hegel was in fact considerably more complicated than Thulstrup, and the standard view, would have one believe. At every stage of Kierkegaard’s literary career, there were points of overlap between his thought and that of Hegel. Kierkegaard in fact had many different relations to Hegel that developed over time. Thus, it is impossible to speak, as Thulstrup and so many others would like to, of Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel. The individual passages in his works examined by Stewart display different kinds of relations: inspirational, revisionary, critical, etc.

Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered embodies a major theme of Stewart's work, which is simply the attempt to understand historical figures (such as Kierkegaard and his contemporaries) in terms of their own time and context. By beginning from historical sources, such as the books and journals in which the debates between Kierkegaard and his contemporaries were carried out, Stewart attempts to come to an understanding of how Kierkegaard would have understood himself. Stewart is perhaps best known as a major proponent of this historical approach to Kierkegaard (and, indeed, the Danish Golden Age in general). By attempting to understand how Kierkegaard would have understood himself, and how he would have been understood by his contemporaries, Stewart has exposed numerous mis-conceptions that stem from our previous lack of knowledge about Kierkegaard's place in the history and culture of Nineteenth Century Denmark. Chief among these mis-conceptions, in Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, being Kierkegaard's relation to Hegel.

It is generally agreed by reviewers that Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, made its mark on research in many different ways. For example, in addition to demonstrating the importance of Danish intellectual history and culture to understanding Kierkegaard, Stewart's work has spawned a wealth of interest in some of the individual figures of this movement such as Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Hans Lassen Martensen. Fourth, it has demonstrated the importance of source-work research in Kierkegaard studies.

In continuing to show the relevance of culture and history to understanding the intellectual and philosophical debates of the Danish Golden Age, in 2007 Stewart published A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome I, The Heiberg Period: 1824-1836 (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2007) and A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome II, The Martensen Period: 1837-1842 (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2007). These studies constitute the most detailed investigations into the influence of Hegel's philosophy on Danish Golden Age culture ever undertaken, and their significance and contribution acknowledge in reviews in the Danish press.

In 2010 Stewart published Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century European Philosophy (New York and London: Continuum International Publishing 2010). Here Stewart continues to develop the conclusions that he reached in Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. The history of philosophy in the first half of the 19th century has been read as a confrontation between the overambitious rationalistic system of Hegel and the devastating criticisms of it by Kierkegaard. In this book Stewart undermines this popular view of the radical break between idealism and existentialism by means of a series of detailed studies in specific episodes of European thought. As a whole, this book represents an important attempt to demonstrate the long shadow cast by Kant and Hegel over the subsequent history of European philosophy.

Translations

In an attempt to promote historical source-work research, Stewart founded the translation series Texts from Golden Age Denmark in 2005. The idea behind this series was to present the international reader with classic texts from the Danish Golden Age that had some relevance for Kierkegaard’s thought. In this way readers could judge for themselves the importance of these works. Each volume of the series presents key texts in dialogue with one another. The volumes are supplemented with detailed introductions and explanatory notes that put the featured texts into their proper historical perspective and indicate the numerous links to Kierkegaard’s works. This series was published at C.A. Reitzel Publishers from 2005 until 2007, and since 2008 with Museum Tusculanum Press. This series has helped to change the way Scandinavian Studies has been taught in the Anglophone world. These texts have become standard reference works in Kierkegaard research.

Editorial work

Stewart has been involved in numerous editorial projects. Most notably, since 2007, he has been editor-in-chief of the monumental series, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources (Ashgate). This series is designed ultimately to contain around 30 volumes, most of which are composed of two or more individual tomes. It is the largest series of Kierkegaard secondary literature ever undertaken. The first section, “Kierkegaard’s Sources” (consisting of 7 volumes and 15 tomes), contains more than 200 articles, presenting the work of more than 100 different authors from over 20 different countries. The second section, “Kierkegaard Reception” (consisting of 7 volumes and 17 tomes), contains more than 200 articles, presenting the work of more 139 different authors from 38 different countries. The third section, “Kierkegaard Resources,” is currently in production.

Awards

Stewart has won many distinguished awards and prizes, from among others the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Belgian American Educational Foundation, the Heinrich Hertz Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service. He is an Honorary Member of the Sociedad Académica Kierkegaard, Mexico and the Biblioteca Kierkegaard Argentina. In 2000 he was the recipient of the Inger Sjöberg Translation Prize from the American-Scandinavian Foundation for his translation of Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age. A special session of the American Søren Kierkegaard Society was dedicated to his book, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, at the Annual Meeting of American Academy of Religion in San Antonio, Texas on November 20, 2004. In 2011 a special issue of the Kierkegaard Newsletter (no. 58, November 2011) was dedicated to his work. In the same year Stewart gave the George W. Utech Memorial Kierkegaard Seminar at the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College.

As part of the onset of Kierkegaard's bicentenary year (2013), Stewart was most recently interviewed by the Danish Newspaper Berlingske.

Books

Anthologies edited

Editions of primary texts

Translations

Works coedited