Benjamin Crowe

Benjamin D. Crowe (Ph.D., Tulane University) works mostly on key figures and debates in classical German philosophy, pursuing questions about religion, moral philosophy, and practical rationality.  He is the author of two studies of the religious thought of Martin Heidegger, both published by Indiana University Press:  Heidegger’s Religious Origins (2005) and Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religion (2006), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on Herder, early Romanticism, F.H. Jacobi, Dilthey, and especially Fichte.  He is the editor and translator of Fichte’s Lectures on the Theory of Ethics (1812) (SUNY Press, 2016), and editor of The Nineteenth Century Philosophy Reader (Routledge, 2015), an anthology of source texts and scholarly introductions.  Along with James D. Reid (Metropolitan State University, Denver), he is the translator of Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning the Thing (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).  With Reid as Principal Investigator, he received a Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in order to complete this translation project.  In 2019, he joined Gabriel Gottlieb (Xavier University) as co-director of the North American Fichte Society, which hosts conferences, workshops, and other events for English-speaking Fichte scholarship (https://www.fichtesociety.org/).  He is also a contributor to the Jacobi-Wörterbuch Online (https://jwo.saw-leipzig.de/), a digital encyclopedia covering the thought of F.H. Jacobi and related topics, overseen by the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaftslehre zu Leipzig.  Along with Gottlieb, he is the editor of Fichte’s 1804 Wissenschaftslehre:  Essays on the ‘Science of Knowing‘ (SUNY Press, 2024).  Most recently, he is the author of a forthcoming volume in the Cambridge Elements of the Philosophy of Heidegger series (edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom) titled Heidegger on Religion.  He also enjoys playing the blues on a baritone ukelele and the poetry of Fernando Pessoa.

Before joining the faculty at BU, Crowe previously belonged to the Philosophy Department and the Honors College at the University of Utah (2004-2016).  Philosophy courses taught at BU include Introduction to Philosophy (PH100), Great Philosophers (PH110), Introduction to Ethics (PH150), Philosophy of Human Nature (PH242), Introduction to Chinese Philosophy (PH247), History of Ancient Philosophy (PH300), History of Ethics (PH350), Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (PH415), and Philosophy of Religion (PH446).

His current writing projects (summer 2024) include:

• A monograph on F.H. Jacobi’s skeptical philosophy
• A monograph tentatively entitled Fichte’s Communities that systematically examines Fichte’s account of different communities of rational beings (the state, the ethical community or church, the nation, the family, and the university) as central to his philosophical project.  A particular focus is on Fichte’s account of individuality – to count for myself as an individual, I must count for myself as a “one-among-many” or member of a community of similar beings.  A related work in progress deals with Fichte’s attempts to resolve the problem of moral disagreement within the ethical community as a condition for moral progress.
• An introduction to Fichte’s philosophy, co-authored with Gabriel Gottlieb
• A re-examination of the role of recognition in Marx’s early writings, in the Grundrisse, and in Capital, in light of Fichte’s derivation of the concepts of right and respect