Professor Christopher Janaway BA, DPhil
Visiting Speaker Coordinator, Professor of Philosophy
Professor Christopher Janaway is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton.
My main work is in History of Philosophy, specialising in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.
I studied Philosophy, Classics, and German as an undergraduate, and have worked primarily in the history of philosophy, interpreting historical texts and applying the methods of analytic philosophy. My DPhil thesis was on Schopenhauer, and provided the basis for the book Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (1989). Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction (2002) made some of this work accessible to a wider audience. The book Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts (1995) arose out of early interests in Aesthetics and Greek Philosophy.
During my time at Southampton my research has been concentrated on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The book Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy appeared in 2007. From 2007 to 2010 I was Principal Investigator on the research project Nietzsche and Modern Moral Philosophy, and began my role as General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer in translation, which was completed with the publication of the sixth volume in 2018. In recent years I have delivered keynote speeches at the North American Nietzsche Society in New York, the International Society for Nietzsche Studies in Bonn, and the Japan Schopenhauer Association in Kyoto. In 2013 I was invited as Brackenridge Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
I have published numerous articles in refereed journals and edited collections. The predominant thematic focus since 2010 has been on the relationships between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer over issues concerning morality, suffering, the self, religion, and affirmation of life versus pessimism. Most recently I have been researching philosophical pessimism in the period after Schopenhauer, and some aspects of classical Indian philosophy, in particular concerning ethics and the metaphysics of self (and Buddhist ‘no-self’), in order to investigate the philosophical significance of Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s respective receptions of Indian philosophy.
Qualifications
BA, Philosophy and German, University of Oxford 1977
DPhil, Philosophy, University of Oxford 1984
Appointments held
Lecturer in Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London 1981–2001
Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Sydney 1991
Professor of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London 2001–2004
Professor of Philosophy, University of Southampton 2005–
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Friday 12:00-13:00 for Semester 1
In room 1045 at Avenue (Building 65).