Ben Craik - 2020 cohort

  Ben Craik pbc29@cam.ac.uk

  Canada

  German, Jesus College

PhD thesis: Nietzsche and the German Question: Art in the Shadow of Empire

Research interests:
  1. Philosophy
  2. The History of Ideas
  3. Political Theory
  4. Aesthetics

My PhD focusses on Nietzsche’s response to the unification of Germany. I’m particularly interested in what this episode tells us about the the relationship between politics and artistic flourishing in his thought. This is also the background against which I think we need to understand Nietzsche’s friendship with Wagner and how and why it came to an end. I approach my work as an historian, which means trying to situate Nietzsche’s texts within the debates of the time; doing so has helped me uncover links between his work and texts and thinkers with whom he had not previously been connected, from Aristotle’s Politics to the works of Constantin Frantz.

Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?

I was inspired to pursue my research interests by a number of very generous scholars and teachers whom I was lucky enough to work with: John Dunn, who supervised my third year political philosophy paper at Cambridge, Timothy Hochstrasser, who taught me intellectual history at LSE; Bob Hancké and Simon Glendinning, also at the LSE, both of whom I owe a great debt of gratitude for their insight and support; and finally, Raymond Geuss, whose lectures on Nietzsche introduced me not only to the figure most central to my research but to a whole new way of doing philosophy too.