Peter E. Gordon
Born	Peter Eli Gordon 1966 (age 59–60) Seattle,Washington, US
Other names	Peter E. Gordon
Years active	1998–present
Academic background
Alma mater	Reed College University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	Under One Tradewind[1] (1997)
Doctoral advisor	Martin Jay
Academic work
Discipline	History
Sub-discipline	Intellectual history
Institutions	Harvard University
Main interests	Martin Heidegger interwarcontinental philosophy secularization
Notable works	Continental Divide (2010)
Website	scholar.harvard.edu/pgordon

Peter Eli Gordon (born 1966) is anAmericanhistorian of philosophy, and acritical theorist. The Amabel B. James Professor of History and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Philosophy atHarvard University, Gordon focuses oncontinental philosophy and modern German and French thought,^[2] with particular emphasis on the German philosophersTheodor Adorno andMartin Heidegger, critical theory, continental philosophy during theinterwar crisis, and most recently,secularization and social thought in the 20th century.^[3]

Born inSeattle,Washington,^[4] in 1966, Peter Gordon was the son of Sunnie andMilton Gordon, a biochemist who attendedUniversity of Minnesota and theUniversity of Illinois,^[5] earning hisDoctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree at 23 and joining the faculty at the University of Washington in 1959, focusing on plant genetics.^[6][7] Peter Gordon received hisBachelor of Arts degree fromReed College (1988) after a stint at theUniversity of Chicago. He studied withMartin Jay atUniversity of California, Berkeley, from which he received his PhD degree (1997).^[4]

Gordon spent two years (1998–2000) at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts atPrinceton University before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2000.^[2] In 2006 he became a member of Harvard's permanent faculty, and in 2005 he received thePhi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching.^[8]

Gordon's first book,Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (University of California Press, 2003), aboutMartin Heidegger and the German-Jewish philosopherFranz Rosenzweig,^[9][10][11] won the Salo W. Baron Prize from the Academy for Jewish Research for Best First Book, the Goldstein-Goren Prize for Best Book in Jewish Philosophy, and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for Best Book in Intellectual History.^[2]

InContinental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard University Press, 2010), Gordon reconstructs the1929 debate between Heidegger andErnst Cassirer atDavos, Switzerland, demonstrating its significance as a point of rupture in Continental thought that implicated all the major philosophical movements of the day.^{[12][13][14][15]}Continental Divide was awarded theJacques Barzun Prize from theAmerican Philosophical Society in 2010.^[16]

Gordon's monograph,Adorno and Existence (Harvard University Press, 2016), reinterpretsTheodor W. Adorno's philosophy by looking at thecritical theorist's encounters withexistentialism andphenomenology. The main claim of the book is that Adorno was inspired by the unfulfilled promise of these schools to combat traditionalmetaphysical thinking, which led to the development of his "negative dialectics".^[17][18][19]

In the most recent years Gordon has published books such asMigrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Seculariation (Yale University Press, 2020) and a major reinterpretation of Adorno's philosophy,A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2023 and the University of Chicago Press, 2024).A Precarious Happiness develops arguments that Gordon first presented in Frankfurt in 1919 for the Adorno Lectures, sponsored by the Institute for Social Research and timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Adorno's death.

Gordon sits on the editorial boards ofConstellations,Modern Intellectual History,Journal of the History of Ideas, andNew German Critique. He is co-founder and co-chair of the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History.^[20] Gordon teaches two survey courses on continental philosophy: German Social Thought and French Social Thought, and a lecture course on Hegel and Marx.

• Rosenzweig and Heidegger, Between Judaism and German Philosophy (University of California Press, 2003)
• The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (co-editor with Michael Morgan, Cambridge University Press, 2007)
• Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard University Press, 2010)
• Weimar Thought: A Critical History (co-editor with John McCormick, Princeton University Press, 2013)
• Adorno and Existence (Harvard University Press, 2016)
• Authoritarianism (co-authored withWendy Brown and Max Pensky, University of Chicago Press, 2018)
• Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization. Yale University Press. 2020.ISBN 9780300250763.
• A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity (University of Chicago Press, 2024)

• "Continental Divide: Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos, 1929—An Allegory of Intellectual History,"Modern Intellectual History. Vol. I, N. 2, (August, 2004), pp. 1–30.
• “The Concept of the Unpolitical: German Jewish Thought and Weimar Political Theology”Social Research. Special Issue on Hannah Arendt's Centenary Volume 74, Number 3 (Fall 2007)
• “Neo-Kantianism and the Politics of Enlightenment”Philosophical Forum (Spring, 2008)
• “The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age”Journal of the History of Ideas Volume 69, Number 4 (October, 2008), pp. 647–673.
• “What Hope Remains?” inThe New Republic, December 14, 2011. OnJürgen Habermas,An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secularist Age andJudith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, et al.,The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere.

• "Science, Realism, and the Unworlding of the World" inThe Blackwell Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, Mark Wrathall and Hubert Dreyfus, eds. (Blackwell, 2006)
• "Hammer without a Master: French Phenomenology and the Origins of Deconstruction (or, How Derrida read Heidegger)" inHistories of Postmodernism, Mark Bevir, et al., eds. (Routledge, 2007)
• "The Artwork Beyond Itself: Adorno, Beethoven, and Late Style" inThe Modernist Imagination: Essays in Intellectual History and Critical Theory in Honor of Martin Jay] (co-editor with Warren Breckman, et al., Berghahn Books, 2008)

• Peter E. Gordon's Main Faculty Page
• Gordon's Faculty Web Page at CES:
• The Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History
• Gordon's brief introduction to intellectual history,"What is Intellectual History?"

• 1966 births
• 20th-century American historians
• 20th-century American male writers
• 21st-century American historians
• 21st-century American male writers
• American historians of philosophy
• American male essayists
• American male non-fiction writers
• Harvard University Department of History faculty
• Harvard University Department of Philosophy faculty
• Heidegger scholars
• Intellectual historians
• Living people
• Reed College alumni
• UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni

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