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 in Indiana University Press’s Series in Philosophy of Religion:  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.

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), and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (PH415).

His current writing projects (summer 2021) include:

• A monograph on skepticism in classical German philosophy
• Fichte’s later moral philosophy
• Re-examining Heidegger’s criticism of phenomenology in his 1920-1921 religion lectures
• Understanding apocalypticism