Saurabh Pal

Before moving to Yale in 2018, I studied German Literature and Philosophy at the JNU, New Delhi and the FU, Berlin. I am currently working on my dissertation Hölderlin’s Naturalism, which looks at Hölderlin’s treatment of the human-nature relation in his principal literary and theoretical works. I hope to show that Hölderlin’s work presents a profound challenge to the anthropocentrism of Critical Philosophy after Kant. The dissertation is a part of my broader project of examining how German thinkers and writers of the Goethezeit on the one hand formulated the concept ’modernity’ in opposition to the Greek way of life, and on the other, conceptualised the category ‘human being’ in opposition to the natural world. This project is informed by the Deep Ecological aim of understanding the nature and implications of anthropocentrism in the Western tradition. As such, my work engages with the fields of literary studies, intellectual history, Classical Reception Studies and Environmental Humanities. My interests also include the conception of the human being in German-language Modernist writers, the history of moral philosophy, and ideas of the Good Life in Greek thought and literature.