Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy; Affiliated Faculty, Department of Religious Studies and Department of German. Ph.D. University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought (2008).  B.A. St. John’s College (2000).

Mark Alznauer specializes in nineteenth century German philosophy.  He is the author of Hegel’s Theory of Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and was the Vice President of the Hegel Society of America (2016-18).  He recently completed a manuscript on Hegel’s mature philosophical system which is tentatively entitled Hegel’s Sole Idea.  He is currently working on a number of projects that have little to no relation to Hegel.

 Books

Hegel’s Theory of Reponsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2015), here.  To read the penultimate version of the introduction, see here.

Theories of Action and Morality. Perspectives from Philosophy and Social Theory, co-edited with J. Torralba (Olms Verlag, 2016).

Hegel on Tragedy and Comedy: New Essays, editor (SUNY Press, 2021)  

 Selected Articles

“Untrue Concepts in Hegel’s Logic,” in Journal of the History of Philosophy (2023).  See the final draft here, and the article here.[Recipient of the Journal of the History of Philosophy Article Prize 2023 and included in Philosopher’s Annual, volume 43, as one of the top ten papers from 2023 .]

“Humor and Metaphysical Truth,” in Crisis and Critique (2023).  See here.

“Alle sind frei: Hegel’s Philosophy of History as Liberal Apologetics” in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Critical Perspectives on Freedom and History (Routledge), ed. Dean Moyar, Sebastian Rand, and Kate Padgett Walsh (2022).  See a longer draft version here.

“Hegel on Aesthetic Reconciliation” in Hegel’s Political Aesthetics (Bloomsbury) ed. Stefan Bird-Pollan and Vladimir Marchenkov (2020).  See a draft here.

“Rival Versions of Objective Spirit,” in Hegel Bulletin (2016).  See here.

 Selected Graduate Courses (click for syllabus)

• Post-Kantian Ethics
• European Social Thought
• Hegel’s Philosophy of History
• Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
• Hegel and Honneth on Freedom
• An Introduction to Hegel’s Logic (forthcoming)

Selected Undergraduate Courses (click for syllabus)

• Contemporary Critical Theory
• Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
• Introduction to Critical Theory
• Introduction to Existentialism
• Slavery, Religion, and the Philosophy of Freedom
• Critiques of Morality: Nietzsche and Bernard Williams
• Kierkegaard and Indirect Communication
• Conservatives, Libertarians, and Reactionaries
• German Aesthetics: Schiller and Hegel
• The Idea of Politics: Weber and Schmitt through Arendt and Habermas (forthcoming)