Raymond Geuss
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Raymond Geuss (born 1946 in Evansville, Indiana), a Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, is a leading political philosopher and one of the world's foremost scholars of 19th and 20th century European philosophy. Geuss took both his undergraduate (1966) and graduate (1971) degrees at Columbia University, where he wrote his thesis under the direction of Robert Denoon Cumming. He formerly taught at the Universities of Princeton, Columbia, and Chicago in the United States and at Heidelberg and Freiburg in Germany before taking up his present post at Cambridge. To date he has published six books of philosophy, of which two are collections of essays. They are The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School; Morality, Culture, and History; Public Goods, Private Goods; History and Illusion in Politics; Politik und Gluck; and Outside Ethics, which has just appeared from Princeton University Press. Together with Quentin Skinner, Geuss co-edits the Cambridge Studies in the History of Political Thought series of books. A serious polyglot, Geuss has also published two collections of translations/adaptations of poetry from Ancient Greek, Latin and Old High German texts.
Geuss is an important educator of scholars working in the history of continental philosophy, social and political philosophy and in the philosophy of art. Many of his former students have become leading scholars.
In his recollections of Richard Rorty (when they both were at Princeton), published in Arion, Winter 2008, Geuss discusses his own pre-university Roman Catholic education and how it immunized him against naive American nationalism.
