Douglas Moggach (
BA Toronto
Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the ancho ...
,
MA and
PhD Princeton
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine ...
) is a professor at the
University of Ottawa
The University of Ottawa (french: Université d'Ottawa), often referred to as uOttawa or U of O, is a bilingual public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on directly to the northeast of Downtown Ottawa ...
and life member of
Clare Hall, Cambridge
Clare Hall is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. Founded in 1966 by Clare College, Clare Hall is a college for advanced study, admitting only postgraduate students alongside postdoctoral researchers and fellows. It ...
. He is Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's si ...
, and has held visiting appointments at
Sidney Sussex College
Sidney Sussex College (referred to informally as "Sidney") is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England. The College was founded in 1596 under the terms of the will of Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex (1531–1589), wife ...
and
King's College, Cambridge
King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Formally The King's College of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge, the college lies beside the River Cam and faces out onto King's Parade in the centre of the city ...
, the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, and the
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
The Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (commonly known in Italy as "la Normale") is a public university in Pisa and Florence, Tuscany, Italy, currently attended by about 600 undergraduate and postgraduate (PhD) students.
It was founded in 1810 wi ...
. Moggach has also held the University Research Chair in Political Thought at the University of Ottawa. In 2007, he won
the Killam Research Fellowship awarded by th
Canada Council for the arts He was named Distinguished University Professor at University of Ottawa in 2011.
Works
Moggach has written on
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathema ...
,
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...
,
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (; ; 19 May 1762 – 29 January 1814) was a German philosopher who became a founding figure of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kan ...
,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends ...
,
Friedrich Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (, short: ; 10 November 17599 May 1805) was a German playwright, poet, and philosopher. During the last seventeen years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller developed a productive, if complicated, friends ...
,
Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer (; 6 September 180913 April 1882) was a German philosopher and theologian. As a student of G. W. F. Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalism, Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism. Bauer investigated the sources of ...
,
aesthetics
Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed thr ...
,
Republicanism
Republicanism is a political ideology centered on citizenship in a state organized as a republic. Historically, it emphasises the idea of self-rule and ranges from the rule of a representative minority or oligarchy to popular sovereignty. It ...
, and history of ancient and modern political thought.
Moggach's research falls into three principal areas: analysis of the philosophy, politics, and economic thought of the Hegelian School; the historical development of German idealism from Leibniz to Hegel; and aesthetics and politics. His archival research led to the discovery and publication of lost texts by Bruno Bauer, a leading figure in the Hegelian School of the 1830s and 1840s. Moggach argues that the political thinking of the German Hegelians represents a specific variant of republicanism, which recognizes modern social diversity and alienation. His works in German Idealism have focused on the foundational importance of Leibniz for Kant and Hegel, and trace the origins of Kant's juridical thought in the German Enlightenment debates about freedom, perfection, and state economic direction. Moggach has also published on aesthetics and politics, notably on Schiller and Bauer, developing the concept of an aesthetic republicanism based on an aesthetic version of Kant's moral idea of autonomy. Moggach also traces the relations between German idealism and various strands of Romanticism, and contributes to conceptions of universality, freedom and republicanism in European political thought. Moggach wrote the chapter on Karl Marx in ''The Impact of Idealism'', ed. N. Boyle and J. Walker, vol. 2 (CUP 2013) and the chapter on "Romantic Political Thought" in ''Oxford Companion to European Romanticism'', ed. P. Hamilton (OUP, 2016). He also wrote the chapter "Aesthetics and Politics" in the Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Political Thought, and the entry "Bruno Bauer" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Moggach discovered an unpublished manuscript by Bruno Bauer, which had been awarded the Prussian Royal Prize in philosophy by a panel headed by Hegel in 1829. This manuscript, written in Latin, is held in the archives of the Humboldt Universität, Berlin, but had not been recognized before. Moggach shows how after attending Hegel's lectures on logic in 1828, Bauer applies this logic to the categories of aesthetic judgement that Kant had developed in his Third Critique. Starting from the Hegelian premise of the unity of thought and being, Bauer wants to show that the separation of subject and object in Kant's Critiques of Pure and of Practical Reason remains a feature of the Critique of Judgement. Bauer argues that Kant does make efforts to bridge the gap, and he opens the path that Hegel will follow, but Kant does not finally succeed in this objective. What prevents him from succeeding is his faulty treatment of the categories involved in making aesthetic judgements. Moggach thinks that in this early text Bauer also lays the foundations for his later theory of infinite self-consciousness, and for his specific type of ethical and historical idealism. An Italian edition, with additional interpretative materials, was released by University of Palermo in 2019.
Moggach's book ''The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer'' (CUP, 2003) is the first major study in English of Bruno Bauer (1809–82), a student of Hegel and a leader of the Hegelian School in Prussia. The book establishes Bauer as a representative of German republicanism, and traces the emergence of this movement from philosophical and religious polemics of the 1830s and 1840s, its relation to Kant and Hegel, and its assessment of political and economic change, especially the French Revolution and its impact on German states. This work was short-listed for the 2004 C. B. Macpherson Prize, awarded by the Canadian Political Science Association. It was reviewed by Frederick Beiser in ''The Times Literary Supplement'', 24 September 2004; ''Choice'', November 2004; and other journals.
A German translation was published in 2009. A Chinese translation appeared in 2022.
Moggach's edited volume, ''The New Hegelians'' (CUP, 2006), is intended to show that after Hegel's death in 1831, members of his school developed his philosophy in new directions in order to understand the evolution of modern society, along with the modern state and economy. The Hegelians were not mere imitators of their teacher, but creative thinkers about modernity and its problems, especially social cohesion and the conflict of individual interests. According to Moggach, many of these New or Young Hegelians found a solution to these conflicts in republican ideas of virtue, rethought so that they are compatible with modern institutions. Moggach applies the idea of republican rigorism, introduced by other historians of political thought, to outline these solutions. For the Hegelians, this concept involves changing the boundaries between morality and legality that Kant had established. Kant had claimed that the legal sphere concerns the external aspects of action alone, but not its motivating principles or maxims. For the Hegelians, though, political action has to promote, or at least not hinder, the external freedom of others, but it must also have the right kinds of internal ethical motivation: this means not acting exclusively from private interest, but from an idea of the general good. In this way Kant's idea of autonomy is related to political as well as moral action, and to republican ideas of freedom as non domination.
In a subsequent edited volume, ''Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates'' (Northwestern UP, 2011), Moggach and his colleagues continue to establish the importance of the Hegelians of the 1830s and 1840s as innovators in theology, aesthetics, and ethics, and as creative contributors to foundational debates about modernity, state, and society. The political significance of religious and aesthetic debates, and the German contributions to republican political thought, receive further attention in this volume, which also draws heavily on archival material.
With Gareth Stedman Jones, Moggach edited a volume on the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe. The book examines political debate in France, England, Netherlands, the German and Italian territories, and Eastern Europe before and after the revolutions. Subjects treated include democracy and representation, state and economy, nationalism and religion. Even if the revolutions failed to win their immediate goals, they set the agenda for later developments.
In the bilingual (German and English) volume Perfektionismus der Autonomie (2020), edited by Moggach with Nadine Mooren and Michael Quante, the contributors study major figures in a tradition identified in Moggach’s previous work as post-Kantian perfectionism, a type of perfectionist ethics that can withstand Kant‘s criticism of earlier forms. The objective is to promote the material, institutional and legal conditions for free action, and not any predefined idea of the good life or happiness. Progressive reform of political and economic institutions to make them conform to the evolving demands of reason is now the aim. The book deals with Herder, Humboldt, Fichte, Schiller, Hegel, and members of the Hegelian school including Karl Marx. Other chapters examine Nietzsche, neo-Kantians, and Adorno. The book concludes with systematic reflections and outlines of future research.
Moggach, Beiser, and other interlocutors debated Schiller's republicanism in a special issue of ''Inquiry'' (2008). Moggach produced a critical discussion of multiculturalism, in a published conversation with
Charles Taylor,
Jeremy Waldron
Jeremy Waldron (; born 13 October 1953) is a New Zealand professor of law and philosophy. He holds a University Professorship at the New York University School of Law, is affiliated with the New York University Department of Philosophy, and was f ...
,
James Tully, and others. Moggach contributed the entry "Hegelian School" to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Publications
Selected Books
* Moggach, D., Mooren, N., and Quante, M., eds., Perfektionismus der Autonomie, Fink Verlag, 2020, 412 pp.
* Moggach, D., and Schimmenti, Gabriele, eds., Bruno Bauer. Sui Principi del Bello, Palermo University Press, 2019, 162 pp.
* Moggach, D., and Stedman Jones, G, eds., The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2018, 488 pp.
* Hudson, W., Moggach, D., Stamm, M., Rethinking German Idealism, Noesis Press, 2016, 110 pp.
* Moggach, D., Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates, Northwestern University Press, 2011, 435 pp.
* Moggach, D., Hegelianismo, Republicanismo e Modernidade, Brazil, PUCRS (Catholic University, Rio Grande do Sul), 2010, 80 pp.
* Moggach, D. (Ed.), The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 345 pp.
* Moggach, D., The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 302 pp; CUP paperback edition, 2007. German translation: Philosophie und Politik bei Bruno Bauer, Frankfurt am Main, Lang, 2009, Studien zum Junghegelianismus, 285 pp.
* Buhr, M., and D. Moggach (Eds.), Reason, Universality, and History, Ottawa, Legas Press, 2004, 303 pp.
* Moggach, D., and P.L. Browne (Eds.), The Social Question and the Democratic Revolution: Aspects of 1848, Ottawa/Toronto, Univ. of Ottawa Press, 2000.
* Moggach, D., Bruno Bauer: Uber die Prinzipien des Schönen. De pulchri principiis. Eine Preisschrift, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1996.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moggach, Douglas
Political philosophers
Living people
21st-century Canadian philosophers
Historians of philosophy
Philosophers of art
Hegelian philosophers
Princeton University alumni
University of Ottawa faculty
German idealism
20th-century Canadian philosophers
Year of birth missing (living people)
University of Toronto alumni