Permanent Lecturer in Philosophy
After completing my studies (B.A., Hendrix College; M.A., Ph.D., Tulane University), I was a faculty member in the Philosophy Department and Honors College at the University of Utah (2004-2016), before joining the Philosophy Department at Boston University (2016-present). I primarily teach history of philosophy courses, including Great Philosophers (PH110), History of Ancient Philosophy (PH300), History of Modern Philosophy (PH310), and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (PH415), as well as other courses on classical Chinese philosophy (PH247) and on ethics and its history (PH150, PH350).
My primary academic interests lie at the intersection of ethics, religion, and philosophy of society in the thought of key figures in classical German philosophy (Please email for a complete CV bcrowe@bu.edu). In addition to journal articles and book chapters on Fichte, I have translated and edited J.G. Fichte’s Lectures on the Theory of Ethics (1812) (SUNY, 2016) and edited a collection of essays (with Gabriel Gottlieb, Xavier University) on Fichte’s 1804 Wissenschaftslehre (SUNY, 2024). Also with Gottlieb, I have served since 2019 as “co-positor” (co-director) of the North American Fichte Society (NAFS; https://www.fichtesociety.org/), the principal academic society dedicated to English-language Fichte scholarship. I have also published two books and a monograph on Martin Heidegger’s religious thought, most recently in Cambridge University Press’s “Elements of the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger” series (Heidegger on Religion, 2025). I have published articles, reviews, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries on the early German Romantics, F.H. Jacobi, J.G. Herder, Wilhelm Dilthey, Neo-Kantianism, and Husserl, as well as on religious naturalism in the Scottish Enlightenment. I have recently joined a team of translators working on a new English-language edition (for Cambridge University Press) of the writings of K.L. Reinhold, edited by Martin Bondeli (Université de Fribourg) and John Walsh (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg). I am also a contributor to the Jacobi-Wörterbuch Online (https://jwo.saw-leipzig.de/), a resource for scholarship on German philosophy in the eighteenth century. I am currently examining and writing on different aspects of Fichte’s philosophy of community, as well as on the role of skepticism in German philosophy during the 1780’s and 1790’s (with primary reference to F.H. Jacobi). Otherwise, you’ll find me with my family, serving as an acolyte at Mass (https://theadventboston.org/calendar/), traveling, reading history and biography and the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, and sometimes trying to play the blues on my baritone ukulele.