Jan Eike Dunkhase will give a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Monday, November 4, at 12:15 pm. His talk is entitled “Whose Historiology? Protocols of a Heidegger Seminar.”

While Martin Heidegger is considered as one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, his impact on the science of history is still an unexplored field. Can historians learn something from Heidegger after all? In his later years, the philosopher spoke out against the historians’ craft in a most decisive way. But having been a genuine historical thinker himself, this wasn’t all he ever had to say on the issue. After briefly sketching Heidegger’s confrontation with historical science, the talk will present an unpublished source: a notebook with the protocols of a seminar Heidegger taught in 1926 at Marburg University on Johann Gustav Droysen‘s Outline of Historiology (Grundriss der Historik, 1868). As an object which gathers different layers of deliberation on the premises of scientific history the notebook is not least noteworthy for some of the protocols’ authors, one of them a future scholar of high renown at Columbia University, Paul Oskar Kristeller.

Jan Eike Dunkhase is an historian of ideas based in Berlin whose research focuses on historiography and German intellectual history in the twentieth century. After receiving his MA in History, Philosophy, and Jewish Studies from Heidelberg University and his PhD in Modern History from Freie Universität Berlin, he worked as a Research Fellow at the Simon-Dubnow-Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University and at the German Literature Archive Marbach. He is the author of Werner Conze: Ein deutscher Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert (2010), Spinoza der Hebräer: Zu einer israelischen Erinnerungsfigur (2013), and Absurde Geschichte: Reinhart Kosellecks historischer Existentialismus (2015). His latest book projects have concerned the history of the German Literature Archive (forthcoming, 2020), and, most recently, the edition of the correspondence between Reinhart Koselleck and Carl Schmitt (forthcoming, 2019).