Gillian Rose (September 20, 1947 – December 9, 1995) was a British scholar who worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Notable facets of this social philosopher's work include criticism of neo-Kantianism and post-modernism, along with what has been described as "a forceful defense of Hegel's speculative thought."
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She was born into a non-practicing Jewish family. While still young her mother divorced her father and shortly afterward married another man, her stepfather, with whom Gillian became close as she drifted from her father. In her memoir "Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life" she claims that her interest in philosophy and desire to pursue it was initiated at age 17 when she read Pascal's Pensées and Plato's The Republic.
Rose attended St. Hilda's College, Oxford where she read economics, philosophy, and politics. She was taught philosophy by Jean Austin, the widow of the philosopher J. L. Austin. After hearing Austin say, "Remember, girls, all the philosophers you will read are much more intelligent than you are" within her first quarter attending the college, she began to bridle under the vision of philosophy Oxford put forth at this time.
Rose's academic career began with a dissertation on Theodor W. Adorno, supervised by Leszek Kolakowski. She was "Reader at the School of European Studies" (the University of Sussex) and then "Professor of Social and Political Thought" at the University of Warwick from 1989 to her death in 1995. As part of her thinking into the Holocaust, Professor Rose was engaged by the "Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz" in 1990.
Rose died at the age of 48 after a severe two-year battle with ovarian cancer.[1] She made a deathbed conversion to Christianity through the Anglican Church.[1] She left to the library of Warwick University parts of her own personal library, including a collection of essential works on the History of Christianity and Theology, which are marked "From the Library of Professor Gillian Rose, 1995" on the inside cover. Gillian Rose is survived by her parents, her sister, the academic and writer Jacqueline Rose, her half sisters, Alison Rose and Diana Stone, and her half brother, Anthony Stone.