Dr Daniel Whistler

Following the publication of 'Schelling's Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity' by Oxford University Press in 2013, my research has tended to Schellingian Naturphilosophie (on which I am currently leading a British Academy project) as well as further investigations into Schelling's philosophy of language. With Benjamin Berger, I have a book of translations and commentaries coming out with Ediburgh University Press, entitled, 'The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801'.

Over the last two years as part of a Humboldt Fellowship at WWU Münster, I have been working concertedly on a monograph on the philosophy of François Hemsterhuis, the late eighteenth-century Dutch thinker who was so influential on Jacobi, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers etc. It is concerned specifically with the turn to dialogue and myth in Hemsterhuis' later work and is provisionally entitled, 'Hemsterhuis and the Writing of Philosophy'.

I am currently developing an elaboration of the conceptual peculiarities of the secular - especially the roles of abstraction, indifference and utopia therein. I am particularly interested in cashing out how these operations are represented imaginatively in modern literature (Hölderlin, Mann, Cendrars, Flaubert etc). I have also been working closely with Daniel J. Hill over a series of AHRC projects to consider the relation between philosophy of religion and social issues, in particular legal cases concerning the uses of religious symbols. This resulted in a 2013 monograph published by Palgrave, 'The Right to Wear Religious Symbols', as well as some more recent research that is in the pipeline. I have also recently edited 'The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Theology', which is due out imminently.