Hans Sluga

Hans D. Sluga (; born 24 April 1937) is a German philosopher who spent most of his career as professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Sluga teaches and writes on topics in the history of analytic philosophy, the history of continental philosophy, as well as on political theory, and ancient philosophy in Greece and China. He has been particularly influenced by the thought of Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault.

Education and career Hans Sluga studied at the University of Bonn and LMU Munich. He subsequently obtained a BPhil at the University of Oxford, where he studied under R. M. Hare, Isaiah Berlin, Gilbert Ryle and Michael Dummett.

Since 1970, Sluga has been a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, serving from 2009 as the William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy until his retirement in 2020. He previously served as a lecturer in philosophy at University College London.

Philosophical work

Sluga describes his philosophical orientation as follows: "My overall philosophical outlook is radically historicist. I believe that we can understand ourselves only as beings with a particular evolution and history." whose challenges are defined by the growth of human populations, rapid technological changes, and an ever more pressing environmental crisis.

Wittgenstein scholar Sluga is a noted interpreter of Wittgenstein and has contributed significantly to Wittgenstein scholarship, including editing the 1996 volume The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein with David G. Stern. He has argued against the relevance of increasingly more detailed and sophisticated analyses of Wittgenstein's work, even claiming that Wittgenstein himself would not have regarded this exegetical excess as a legitimate concern for philosophy. In recent years, he has endorsed Rupert Read's "post-therapeutic" or "liberatory" interpretation of Wittgenstein.

Books Gottlob Frege, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1980 Chinese translation, Beijing 1990, 2nd ed. 1993 Greek translation, Athens 2010 Heidegger's Crisis. Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany, Harvard U. P. 1993 Chinese translation, Beijing 2015 Bulgarian translation, Sofia 2024 Wittgenstein, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011 Italian translation, 2012 Arabic translation, 2014 Chinese translation, 2015 Politics and the Search for the Common Good, Cambridge U. P. 2014 The Philosophy of Frege, (ed.), 4 vols., Garland Press, 1993 The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, (ed. With David Stern), Cambridge U. P. 1996 Licensed Chinese edition, Beijing 2007