Espen Hammer

Espen Hammer (born 1966) is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University.

Focusing on modern European thought from Kant and Hegel to Adorno and Heidegger, Hammer’s research includes critical theory, Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology, German idealism, social and political theory, and aesthetics.

He has also written widely on the philosophy of literature and taken a special interest in the question of temporality.

Born in Oslo, in 1966, Hammer received his basic education, including a Bachelor of Arts degree (1989) from University of Oslo, in Norway.

He is a frequent contributor to public debate and has several times written for New York Times’ The Stone. From 1990 to 1996 he co-edited the Norwegian journal of philosophy Agora.

“Wittgenstein and the Prospects for a Contemporary Literary Criticism,” in Robert Chodat and John Gibson (eds.), Wittgenstein and Literary Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 104-25.

“Rorty’s Approach to Kant and Hegel,” in Martin Mueller (ed.), Handbuch Richard Rorty (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2023),

“The Sixties,” in Lydia Goehr and Jonathan Gilmore (eds.), A Companion to Arthur C. Danto (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2022), 161-68.

“Critical Theory,” in C. M. van den Akker, The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2021), 98-112.

“Logic and Voice: Stanley Cavell on Analytic Philosophy,” in Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 9: 9 (2021): 105-118.

After a year as DAAD-fellow at the universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt, Hammer, then a Fulbright Fellow, received his Master of Arts degree (1991) in philosophy from Columbia University.

In 1995, having studied with, among others, Yirmiahu Yovel, Agnes Heller, Seyla Benhabib, Reinhart Koselleck, and Richard Bernstein, he received his PhD degree in philosophy from the New School for Social Research.

In 1995, Hammer published a Norwegian translation of Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft.

After a period as Humboldt-Fellow at the University of Frankfurt, working with Axel Honneth, and as Associate and later full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, Hammer spent seven years (1998-2005) as Lecturer and later Reader in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Essex.

His first book, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Polity Press, 2002) analyzes the philosophy of Stanley Cavell in the context of Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophy, and the question of selfhood.

He has also co-edited two German books: Stanley Cavell: Die Unheimlichkeit des Gewöhnlichen (Fischer Verlag, 2002) and Pragmatik und Hermeneutik: Studien zur Kulturpolitik Richard Rortys (Felix Meiner Verlag, 2011).

Hammer has published four Norwegian monographs: Adorno (Gyldendal, 2002), ''Det indre mørke.

Et essay om melankoli (Universitetsforlaget, 2004, translated into Swedish, Russian, and Serbian), Anstendighet og revolt: Noen betraktninger omkring Dag Solstads forfatterskap (Oktober, 2011), and USA.

En supermakt i krise'' (Kagge, 2021).

In ''USA.

En supermakt i krise'', he analyzes the causes of American political polarization.

Between 2005 and 2009 he served as Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, The New School, and University of Pennsylvania before, in 2009, becoming Professor of Philosophy at Temple University.

Since 2021 he has chaired the Philosophy Department at Temple.

In Adorno and the Political (Routledge, 2005), Hammer reconstructs the often neglected political dimension of Theodor W. Adorno’s thought.

As opposed to a widespread view of this philosopher as an apolitical aesthete, Hammer shows how important the political is for his work, and how political questions influence both his theoretical contributions and his social involvement.

Hammer is the editor of German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2005), Theodor W. Adorno II: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers (Routledge, 2015), and Kafka’s The Trial: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2018).

From 2006 to 2008 he was a Recurrent Visiting Professor at the Center for the Study of Cultural Complexity, University of Oslo.

A more recent monograph, Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2011), reinterprets central figures from the European philosophical tradition, including Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Adorno in terms of their views of temporality.

It is claimed that with the onset of modernity, lived time engenders a sense of crisis focused on existential meaning and transitoriness.

While recognizing this crisis, these thinkers each present recommendations for how this crisis should be tackled.

The study demonstrates Hammer’s interest in re-reading the canon from the vantage-point of the question of modernity and modernization.

For the publication, Hammer was granted the 2012 Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy Symposium Book Award.

Hammer’s subsequent book, Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is a comprehensive study of Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics and its relation to metaphysics, politics, and culture.

He is currently completing a book on philosophy and religion, After the Death of God: Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kant to Nietzsche (The University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

His Routledge Guidebook to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Fred Rush, is forthcoming from Routledge.

Hammer has competed in four world championships of sailing, most recently in the 2018 Hague Offshore Sailing World Championship.

His brother Øyvind Hammer is Professor of Paleontology at the University of Oslo.

He currently lives in Philadelphia and is married to the philosopher Kristin Gjesdal with whom he has two children.

With Peter Gordon and Axel Honneth, he edited The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School (2018).

With Peter Gordon and Max Pensky he edited A Companion to Adorno (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020).