Espen Hammer

I’m Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Temple University. Before coming to Temple, I taught as Lecturer and Reader at the University of Essex (UK), and I have also been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. I have held visiting professorships at Penn and The New School for Social Research, and a Humboldt Fellowship at the University of Frankfurt.

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​My research interest includes critical theory, German idealism and post-Kantian philosophy, social and political philosophy, Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy, and aesthetics. My books include Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (2002); Adorno and the Political (2005); Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory (2011); Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe (2015); and After the Death of God: Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kant to Nietzsche (2025).

The recently completed Routledge Guidebook to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Fred Rush, is coming out in the fall of 2025. I have translated Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment into Norwegian and published four monographs in that language on literature, politics, and culture, including USA: En supermakt i krise (2021), in which I analyze the political polarization in the United States.

​I have also edited and co-edited various anthologies: German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives (2005); Theodor W. Adorno II: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers (2015); Kafka’s The Trial: Philosophical Perspectives (2018); The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School (2018); A Companion to Adorno (2020); Stanley Cavell: Die Unheimlichkeit des Gewöhnlichen (2002); Pragmatik und Hermeneutik: Studien zur Kulturpolitik Richard Rortys (2011).