James Conant

James Conant is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago. He has served as co-director of the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism in Leipzig since 2012. He is also the director of the Center for German Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He received both his BA (1982) and PhD (1990) from Harvard University. He was Assistant, then Associate, and then Full Professor, over a period of nine years, at the University of Pittsburgh, before moving to Chicago in 1999. He works broadly in philosophy and has published articles in Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Aesthetics, German Idealism, and History of Analytic Philosophy, among other areas, and on a wide range of philosophers, including Kant, Emerson, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Josiah Royce, William James, Frege, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Putnam, Cavell, Rorty, and McDowell, among others. He is currently working on four book-length projects: a monograph on skepticism entitled Varieties of Skepticism, a co-authored collection of essays with Cora Diamond entitled Wittgenstein and the Inheritance of Philosophy, a book on film aesthetics entitled The Ontology of the Cinematographic Image, and a forthcoming collection of interpretative essays on a variety of philosophers entitled Resolute Readings. He has edited, among other things, two volumes of Hilary Putnam's papers and co-edited (with John Haugeland) one volume of Thomas Kuhn's papers, with a second posthumous work by Kuhn soon to be completed. Together with Jay Elliot, he is about to bring out the volume of the Norton Anthology of Philosophy on The Analytic Tradition.

He has taught as a visiting professor at the College de France, Postdam University, the LMU in Munich, University of Amsterdam, University of Bergen, University of Helsinki, University of Iceland in Reykyavik, University of Picardy in Amiens, University of Uppsala, Leipzig University, Göttingen University, University College Dublin, University of Veracruz in Xalapa, Humboldt University in Berlin, and the University of Rome La Sapienza. From 1990 to 1993 he was a Fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows, from 2008 to 2009 at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and from 2012 to 2013 at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the University of Goettingen. From 2006 to 2008, together with David Wellbery, he was a co-recipient of a Mellon Foundation Saywer Seminar Grant. He is the co-recipient of two Humboldt TransCoop Awards, one with Sebastian Rödl and one with Pirmin Stekeler, each of which has facilitated numerous philosophical projects, workshops, and conferences sponsored jointly by the Departments of Philosophy at Leipzig University and the University of Chicago. In 2012 he was awarded the Anneliese Meier Prize by the Humboldt Foundation. 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.

He serves on a number of academic advisory boards, including those of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, the Berlin Center for Knowledge Research, the North American Nietzsche Society, the Wittgenstein Initiative, and the Internationale Ludwig Wittgenstein Gesellschaft. He is also a member of the senior editorial board of the bi-lingual German-English journal Wittgenstein-Studien: Internationales Jahrbuch für Wittgenstein-Forschung and the senior editorial board of the bi-lingual Italian-English journal Iride. Together with Günter Abel, he is co-editor of the book series Berlin Studies in Knowledge Research, as well as a member of the advisory board of the book series called Nordic Wittgenstein Studies.Together with Andrea Kern, he is the co-director of the Center for Analytic German Idealism and co-editor of the affiliated book series Analytischer Deutscher Idealismus. He served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago for three years, stepping down in July 2011, and serving again as Interim Chair for the academic years 2014-15 and 2025-26.