Manfred Frank is a German philosopher whose extensive work focuses on German idealism, romanticism, and the concepts of subjectivity and self-consciousness. His monumental study of German romanticism is regarded as one of the most important post-war contributions to the history of German philosophy. Frank explores profound questions of human existence and consciousness with exceptional thoroughness. His writing offers a unique perspective on the evolution of philosophical thought.
This essay takes a position in a nonexistent debate - a debate about dissent and consensus that ideally should have taken place between Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas, but which has never materialized. This debate tests the boundary that separates the consensus-oriented exchanges of arguments from the adherence to a disseminal, non-unified plurality of utterances.
Explores the philosophical contributions and contemporary relevance of early German Romanticism.
The work of the German philosopher Manfred Frank has profoundly affected the direction of the contemporary debate in many areas of philosophy and literary theory. This present collection, first published in 1998, brings together some of his most important essays, on subjects as diverse as Schleiermacher's hermeneutics, the status of the literary text, and the response to the work of Derrida and Lacan. Frank shows how the discussions of subjectivity in recent literary theory fail to take account of important developments in German Idealist and Romantic philosophy. The prominence accorded language in literary theory and analytic philosophy, he claims, ignores key arguments inherited from Romantic hermeneutics, those which demonstrate that interpretation is an individual activity never finally governed by rules. Andrew Bowie's introduction situates Frank's work in the context of contemporary debates in philosophy and literary theory.