About

I am currently a reader in philosophy at Royal Holloway. I completed my PhD at the University of Warwick, under the supervision of Prof. Stephen Houlgate, with a thesis dealing with the responses of Gilles Deleuze and G. W. F. Hegel to certain problems emerging from Kant’s transcendental idealism (you can download the thesis). My current research concerns the interrelations of German idealism and French philosophy more generally, demonstrating that reading that tradition in the light of German idealism allows us to see new continuities between its phenomenological and post-structuralist approaches. This allows us to see it as problem-centred, and to relate both approaches more easily to traditional philosophical themes. I also have a strong interest in the work of Kierkegaard, and the way in which his  ethical work (and the attempt to chart an alternative to Hegel’s ethics of recognition), might share affinities with analogous efforts to move away from Hegelian metaphysics in the twentieth century.

You can find my CV here.

You can contact me at henry.somershall@gmail.com.