Dr Richard Elliott

Overview

Biography

Richard Elliott is Lecturer in European Philosophy at Birkbeck, in the School of Historical Studies. Before that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow for the British Society for the History of Philosophy.

Richard has published widely on themes in 19th and 20th Century European Philosophy, drawing on the works of figures such as Nietzsche, Adorno, Heidegger, Freud, Wagner, and others. He has also published on topics in Early Modern Philosophy, as well as ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion.

He currently has a book under contract with Cambridge University Press, on the subject of Nietzsche and the Death of God.

He is Co-Convenor of the new 'Guises of Nihilism in Early and Late Modern Philosophy' Project, with Professor G. Anthony Bruno (Royal Holloway).

Office hours

Please book an appointment by email.

Web profiles

• Academia.edu Profile

Administrative responsibilities

• BA Philosophy Admissions Tutor (Summer Term 2023 - 4)

Research

Research overview

My Primary Research is in Post-Kantian European philosophy, especially:

i. Nietzsche’s contributions to topics in ethics, moral psychology and philosophical psychology;
ii. Consciousness, estrangement, and the role of aesthetics in Adorno;
iii. Fanon and the possibility of a 'standpoint phenomenology';
iv. The later Heidegger on metaphysics and its supposed 'overcoming';
v. The function and status of ‘forms of life’ in the later Wittgenstein

Other Currently Active Research Areas :

i. Paper on 'Truthfulness and the External Criteria for Authenticity’
ii. Paper on 'The so-called "Continental" Contribution to Metaethics'
iii. Interdisciplinary paper (intellectual history/philosophy) on Nietzsche's valorisation of Frederick the Great

 

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

I am currently supervising students at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Topics include:

-Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence

-The possibility of presuppositionless philosophy in Hegel's Phenomenology

-The function of the Apollonian/Dionysian in Nietzsche

-Freedom and Agency in Sartre and Hayek

-The metaethical status of value pluralism in Isaiah Berlin 

-Foucault and the 'genealogy of homelessness'

-The political function of violence in Arendt and Bauman

-Forms of political freedom in the works of Foucault

-Virtue in Spinoza

Teaching

Teaching modules

• The Philosophy of Nietzsche (Level 7) (SSPL114S7)
• Research in Practical Philosophy (SSPL158S7)
• Themes in Twentieth-Century French and German Philosophy (Level 7) (SSPL267S7)
• Problems of Explanation and Interpretation (SSPO271S5)

Publications

External Repositories