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Hans D. Sluga (German:[ˈsluːga]; born 24 April 1937) is a German philosopher who spent most of his career as professor ofphilosophy at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. Sluga teaches and writes on topics in the history ofanalytic philosophy, the history ofcontinental philosophy, as well as on political theory, and ancient philosophy inGreece andChina. He has been particularly influenced by the thought ofGottlob Frege,Ludwig Wittgenstein,Martin Heidegger,Friedrich Nietzsche, andMichel Foucault.
Hans Sluga studied at theUniversity of Bonn and theUniversity of Munich. He subsequently obtained a BPhil[1] atOxford, where he studied underR. M. Hare,Isaiah Berlin,Gilbert Ryle andMichael Dummett.[2]
Since 1970, Sluga has been a professor ofphilosophy at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, serving from 2009 as the William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy until his retirement in 2020.[3] He previously served as a lecturer in philosophy atUniversity College London.
Sluga describes his philosophical orientation as follows: "My overall philosophical outlook is radically historicist. I believe that we can understand ourselves only as beings with a particular evolution and history."[1]
He has worked extensively on the early history of analytic philosophy. In his writings onGottlob Frege he has sought to establish the influence ofImmanuel Kant,Hermann Lotze, and ofneo-Kantians likeKuno Fischer andWilhelm Windelband on Frege's views on the foundations of mathematics and in the theory of meaning. This historically oriented approach to Frege's thought brought him into sharp conflict withMichael Dummett's "realist" interpretation of Frege. Sluga's work in analytic philosophy has been influenced substantially by Wittgenstein to whose early and late writings he has devoted a number of studies. His writings on both Frege and Wittgenstein have contributed to the development of the study of the history of analytic philosophy as a field within analytic philosophy.[citation needed]
Since the early 1990s Sluga has become increasingly concerned with political philosophy. InHeidegger's Crisis he set out to explore the question why philosophers from Plato till the present get so often entangled in dangerous political affairs. Sluga analyzes Heidegger's political engagement by putting it into the larger context of the development of German philosophy in the Nazi period. He seeks to show thereby that many diagnoses of Heidegger's politics are misdirected because of their overly narrow focus on the person and work of Heidegger. He challenges, in particular, the claim that Heidegger's critique of reason is to blame for his political errors by pointing out that committed "rationalists" among the German philosophers were prone to the same errors. Sluga's book seeks to show that the willingness to involve themselves politically not only Heidegger, but also of Neo-Kantians like Bruno Bauch, Neo-Fichteans like Max Wundt, and Nietzscheans like Alfred Baeumler was ultimately due to their misconceived belief that they were living through a moment of world-historical crisis in which they were particularly called upon to intervene.
His bookPolitics and the Search for the Common Good seeks to re-think politics in substantially new terms. Sluga distinguishes in it between a long tradition of "normative political theorizing" that ranges fromPlato andAristotle through Kant to contemporary writers likeJohn Rawls and a more recent form of "diagnostic practice" that emerged in the 19th century and whose first practitioners wereKarl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. Diagnostic political philosophy, Sluga argues, does not seek to establish political norms through a process of abstract philosophical reasoning but seeks to reach practical conclusions through a careful diagnosis of the political realities. Identifying himself with this strand of political philosophizing, Sluga proceeds to examine the thinking ofCarl Schmitt,Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault as 20th century exemplars of the diagnostic approach. The book seeks to highlight the promise and the achievements of the diagnostic method as well as its shortcomings so far and its inherent limitations. In doing so, Sluga maps out an understanding of politics that makes use of some of Wittgenstein's methodological concepts. He characterizes politics as a family resemblance phenomenon and argues that the concept of politics does not identify a natural kind. It is therefore also mistaken to assume that there is a single common good at which all politics aims. Similarly, we must forgo the belief that there is a best form of government (as, e.g., democracy). Politics must, rather, be conceived as a continuous search for a common good which can have no final, conclusive answer. It is a sphere of uncertainty in which we operate always with a radically incomplete and unreliable picture of where we are and with only shifting ideas of where we want to go. The institutional forms that this search takes will change over time. Sluga agrees with other diagnostic thinkers that the classical institution of the modern state is now giving way to a new form of political order which he calls "the corporāte," whose challenges are defined by the growth of human populations, rapid technological changes, and an ever more pressing environmental crisis.
Sluga is a noted interpreter ofWittgenstein and has contributed significantly to Wittgenstein scholarship, including editing the 1996 volumeThe Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein with David G. Stern.[4] He has argued against the relevance of increasingly more detailed and sophisticated analyses of Wittgenstein's work, even claiming that Wittgenstein himself would not have regarded this exegetical excess as a legitimate concern for philosophy.[5] In recent years, he has endorsedRupert Read's "post-therapeutic" or "liberatory" interpretation of Wittgenstein.[6][7]
