Michael Kretowicz

PhD Candidate in Political Thought and Intellectual History
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I completed my undergraduate studies in law and politics at the University of Queensland, Australia, and then took the MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at Cambridge. In 2020 I continued to the PhD, under the supervision of Prof. Duncan Bell.

My research is supported by the Cambridge Trust and King's College, and by a Prince Consort Studentship.

My doctoral project is an intellectual history of a group of philosophers in nineteenth century France and America who sought to mediate between individual and collective, self and world, and, in doing so, challenged received ideas about human development, the pedagogical function of history, and the vocation of the philosopher.

I focus on Victor Cousin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henri Bergson, and William James, reconstructing the conceptual vocabulary they used to define the role and work of the philosophical mediator. Some concepts were quite spiritual, e.g., 'consciousness', 'form', and 'love'. Others, such as 'progress', 'justice', and 'history', were more worldly and reflected the fact that these philosophers understood their intellectual efforts in terms of various mediations between past and present, ancient times and modernity.

The more theoretical side of my project specifies the kinds of individuals and collectives that philosophical mediation was meant to shepherd into existence.

 

I supervise undergraduates for POL11/Paper 5: Political Philosophy and the History of Political Thought since c.1890.

"The Counter-Revolutionary Moment in French Philosophy," Cambridge Graduate Workshop in Political Thought and Intellectual History, Cambridge, February 2023

"Bon sens in the Lycée Philosophy of Henri Bergson," International Society for Intellectual History, Venice, September 2022

"Bertrand Russell's Pure Philosophy," King's College History Work in Progress, Cambridge, December 2021

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King's College, Cambridge CB2 1ST

Email
mrk48@cam.ac.uk
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