Paul A. Kottman

Paul A. Kottman (born 1970) is a comparatist, literary critic and scholar whose recent work belongs to the tradition of Aesthetic philosophy and anthropological philosophy. He is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he is a member of the Committee on Liberal Studies, and is affiliated with the Philosophy Department. He holds the Abilitazione, Professore Ordinario in Filosofia, Estetica (Professor of Philosophy, Aesthetics) in Italy. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University del Piemonte Orientale, (2006); the University of Tokyo (2011-12); the Università degli studi di Verona; Instituto per gli studi filosofici, Naples; and the International Chair in Political Languages, Dipartimento di Politiche Pubbliche e Scelte Colletive (POLIS). He has held a fellowship at Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, Universität zu Köln, and is Full Professor of Philosophy (Aesthetics), Italy National Scientific Committee. He is also the editor of a new book series at Stanford University Press, Square One: First Order Questions in the Humanities, is on the editorial board of Cultura della Modernità (Edizioni ETS, Italy), and the advisory boards of Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism and the Arts (Columbia University Press) and Corpus: Filosofie e sapere (Paparo Edizioni, Italy)

Kottman is known for his philosophical readings of Shakespeare, and Shakespearean tragedy, in various essays and in his book, [1] Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare]. According to Kottman, "Shakespearean tragedy works through the loss of any 'given' — nature, or God, or “fate” — that might explain human societies, histories, actions, destinies, relationships and values. Shakespeare challenges us to understand tragedies not as responding to existential facts (desire, or mortality) or historical situations (Henry V’s invasion of France, or the fate of the Roman republic), but as responding to the fact that there are no givens that fully govern our activities. At the same time, Shakespearean tragedy works through the loss of social bonds on which we depend for the meaning and worth of our lives together — showing those bonds to be, in spite of that dependence, fully dissolvable. In this way, Shakespearean tragedy helps us make sense of how we interact one another — without the help of any Archimedean standpoint, with only the interactions themselves as sources of intelligibility and meaning. In Shakespearean tragedy, our actions (must) explain themselves…. "