John McCumber
Distinguished Professor and Chair Germanic Languages UCLA
My latest book is: The Philosophy Scare: The Politics of Reason in the Late Cold War. I have a blog in which some of the ideas in the book are elaborated further.
BIOGRAPHY
John McCumber was born and raised in Champaign, Illinois; his family were grocers. He received his BA in philosophy from Pomona College and his MA, also in philosophy, from the University of Toronto. His PhD, also from Toronto, is however in Philosophy and Greek.
From 1974 to 1997 he taught in philosophy departments at the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan-Dearborn, the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, and Northwestern University, where he won the Koldyke Chair (at that time the highest teaching award in the College of Arts and Sciences). While gaining tenure at Northwestern, he unintentionally angered Jürgen Habermas, which resulted in his being driven from the philosophy department by Habermas’ henchmen; details will be published in Vertiginous Instincts, the second volume of his memoires, forthcoming. His first stop after philosophy was Northwestern’s German Department. Three years later, he moved to UCLA, where he began by teaching in the departments of Classics, Philosophy, and Political Science as well as Germanic Languages. Once Germanic Languages was willing to support more courses in German philosophy, he moved all his teaching there, and he is now distinguished professor in and Chair of that department. His salient ethnicities (a concept to be discussed at philosophyscare.com) are Hungarian Jewish and Highland Scottish.PUBLICATIONS
Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989 (504 pp.)
The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993 (442 pp.)
Metaphysics and Oppression: Heidegger’s Challenge to Western Philosophy, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999 (338 pp.)
Philosophy and Freedom: Derrida—Rorty—Habermas—Foucault, Indiana University Press, 2000 (184 pp.)
Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era,, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2000
Reshaping Reason: Toward a New Philosophy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005
Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought, Durham: Acumen, 2011
On Philosophy: Notes from a Crisis, Stanford University Press, 2012
Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant, Stanford University Press, 2014
The Philosophy Scare: The Politics of Reason in the Early Cold War, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016
Edited Book: Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger, co-edited with Rebecca Comay (Toronto); Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999 (245 pp.)
Web publication : Limns: A Philosophical Exploration, self-publication available at www.johnmccumber.com (ms length: 213 pp.)
MISCELLANIA
Who knows what goes here?