Eckart Förster

Eckart Förster (born January 12, 1952) is a German philosopher. His research centers on Immanuel Kant, German idealism, and Goethe's philosophy of science. He is best known for his book The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, for which he received the Kuno Fischer Prize in 2017.

He taught as a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore until becoming emeritus on January 1, 2021. Since 2004, he has been an honorary professor at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Life Förster studied from 1971 to 1973 at the Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology in Frankfurt am Main (Philosophicum 1973), from 1973 to 1976 philosophy in Frankfurt and from 1976 at the University of Oxford with a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1979 (Prolegomena to a Theory of Transcendental Arguments) and a doctorate in 1982 (Kant and the Problem of Transcendental Arguments) under Peter Strawson. From 1980 to 1982 he was lecturer at Balliol College in Oxford, from 1982 to 1983 lecturer at Harvard University and from 1983 to 1996 professor at Stanford University (1983 assistant professor, 1990 associate professor, 1996 full professor), both in the Department of Philosophy and German Studies. In 1996, he became a full professor at LMU Munich (Chair II as successor to Dieter Henrich), which he remained until 2003. From 2001 to 2020, he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University. From 2004 to 2020, he was also an honorary professor at Humboldt University Berlin.

He was a visiting professor at Princeton University in 1988/89, at the Federal University of Porto Alegre in Brazil in 1998, at Ohio State University in 1999 (Max Kade visiting professor) and at New York University in 2022 (Eberhard Berent Goethe Chair). The Japanese version of the book was published in 2021. He has also published on Kant's Opus postumum (English edition with commentary 1993), Goethe's philosophy of science, the Pythagorean tradition and Hölderlin.

He is the author of the articles Jacob Sigismund Beck in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Hölderlin in Metzler Lexikon Religiöser Denker (2000) and Gadamer in the Fontana Biographical Compendium of Modern Thought as well as contributions to the Kant-Lexikon (ed. Marcus Willaschek et al., de Gruyter 2015).

Publications in English

Monographs

Translations

Editions

Articles