James Ferguson Conant is an American philosopher who has written extensively on topics in philosophy of language, ethics, and metaphilosophy. He is perhaps best known for his writings on Wittgenstein, and his association with the New Wittgenstein school of Wittgenstein interpretation initiated by Cora Diamond. He is currently Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago, he is Humboldt Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Analytic German Idealism at the University of Leipzig. He is also Director of the Center for German Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Under his leadership, these two research centers form the main axis of an international philosophical network, spanning Germany, Israel and the United States.
Life
Conant was born in Kyoto, Japan to American parents. He is the grandson of former Harvard University presidentJames Bryant Conant. At 14, he attended Phillips Exeter Academy. He received his A.B. in Philosophy and History of Science from Harvard College in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1990. He joined the philosophy faculty at the University of Pittsburgh from 1990-1999, and then became Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. In December, 2012, he became co-director of the Center for Analytic German Idealism at Leipzig University, and in July, 2017 he was appointed Humboldt Professor of Philosophy at Leipzig University.
Philosophical work
Since the mid 1990s Conant, together with Cora Diamond has advanced a “resolute reading” of Wittgenstein's early work which seeks to expose neglected underlying continuities between the philosopher's early and later approaches to philosophy, especially between his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his later Philosophical Investigations. This resolute reading is meant to show that even in the Tractatus, the purpose of philosophy is the clarification of philosophical problems, aimed at the elucidation of the sentences of the language through which we express ourselves rather than at propounding philosophical theses. This reading subjects the traditional interpretations of Wittgenstein, particularly that of Peter Hacker and Gordon Baker, to severe criticism. Hacker, as well as others like Ian Proops and Michael Forster have in turn criticized Conant's representation of them.
Conant has contributed to other areas in the history of analytic philosophy, writing particularly about the work of Gottlob Frege, of Rudolf Carnap, as well as about the relation between the views of both of these figures and those of Wittgenstein. A related theme running throughout Conant's work is the relation between the ideas of Immanuel Kant, and the Kantian tradition more broadly, and the analytic tradition.
Although his philosophical orientation is largely that of someone trained in the analytic tradition, Conant has also written a series of essays on various so-called “Continental" Philosophers, most notably on Kierkegaard and on Nietzsche. In his readings of specific texts by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, he explores the theme of how the literary form of a philosophical text is intertwined with its philosophical content. Relatedly, Conant has written a number of essays exploring the treatment of philosophical ideas in literary texts, ranging from the short stories of Franz Kafka to the novels of George Orwell.
A recurring topic throughout Conant’s work is that of philosophical skepticism. In this connection, he has drawn a distinction between two varieties of skepticism, which he calls “Cartesian skepticism” and “Kantian skepticism” respectively. Another major research area of Conant’s is the history of analytic philosophy. In 2017, together with Jay Elliott, he brought out a comprehensive volume in the Norton Anthologies series, titled After Kant: The Analytic Tradition, covering the entire range of the analytic tradition in philosophy from its beginnings to the present. In 2020, Harvard University Press published the 1100-page volume The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics, edited by Sofia Miguens. The volume gathers Conant’s 1991 article The Search for Logically Alien Thought with reflections on it by eight distinguished philosophers: Jocelyn Benoist, Matthew Boyle, Martin Gustafsson, Arata Hamawaki, Adrian Moore, Barry Stroud, Peter Sullivan, and Charles Travis — followed by Conant’s wide-ranging set of responses to them.
Awards
In 2016, Conant was one of three academics from abroad selected to receive Germany’s top international research award, the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship Research Prize. In 2012 James Conant received the Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Award, a five-year award to promote the internationalisation of the humanities and social sciences in Germany.
In summer 2011, the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto in Portugal hosted a conference titled The Logical Alien at 20, dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the publication of James Conant's paper "The Search for Logically Alien Thought".
