The Scottish Center For Continental Philosophy is pleased to announce the publication of Dr Oisin Keohane’s new book, titled Cosmo-nationalism: American, French and German Philosophy.
The book interrogates the rise of national philosophies and their impact on cosmopolitanism and nationalism.
The idea of national philosophy carries in it a strange contradiction. We talk about ‘German philosophy’ or ‘American philosophy’. But philosophy has always pictured itself to be the project of universality. It presents itself as something that takes place outside or beyond the national – detachable from language, culture and history.
So why do we assign nationalities to philosophies? Building on Jacques Derrida’s unpublished seminars on philosophical nationalism, Oisín Keohane claims that national philosophies are a variant of some form of cosmo-nationalism: a strain of nationalism that uses, rather than opposes, ideas in cosmopolitanism to advance the aims of one nation.
About the author: Oisín Keohane is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. Previously, he was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, IASH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and NRF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Johannesburg.
Key words: nationalism, cosmopolitanism, German Idealism, French philosophy, American transcendentalism
Key thinkers: Derrida, Fichte, Kant, Tocqueville and Emerson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Date of release: 28th of February 2018