Gillian Rose
| Gillian Rose | |
|---|---|
| Born |
20 September 1947 London, England |
| Died |
9 December 1995 (aged 48) Coventry, Warwickshire, England |
| Alma mater | St Hilda's College, Oxford |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Neo-Hegelianism |
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Main interests
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Law, ethics |
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Notable ideas
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The "broken middle" |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Gillian Rosemary Rose (née Stone; 20 September 1947 – 9 December 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 defence of Hegel's speculative thought."
Gillian Rose was born in London into a non-practicing Jewish family. Shortly after her parents divorced, when Rose was still quite young, her mother married another man, her stepfather, with whom Rose became close as she drifted from her biological father. These aspects of her family life figured in her late memoir Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life (1995). Also in her memoir, she claims that her "passion for philosophy" was bred at age 17 when she read Pascal's Pensées and Plato's Republic.
Rose attended Ealing grammar school and went on to St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she read PPE. Taught philosophy by Jean Austin, widow of the philosopher J. L. Austin, she later described herself as bristling under the constraints of Oxford-style philosophy. She never forgot Austin remarking in class, "Remember, girls, all the philosophers you will read are much more intelligent than you are." And in a late interview, Rose commented of philosophers trained at Oxford, "It teaches them to be clever, destructive, supercilious and ignorant. It doesn’t teach you what’s important. It doesn’t feed the soul." Before beginning her DPhil at St. Antony's College, Oxford, she studied in New York and West Berlin.
Rose's career began with a dissertation on Theodor W. Adorno, supervised by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, who wryly spoke to her of Adorno as a third-rate thinker. This dissertation eventually became the basis for her first book, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (1978). She became well known partly through her critiques of postmodernism and post-structuralism. In Dialectic of Nihilism (1984), for instance, she leveled criticisms at Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Later, in her essay "Of Derrida's Spirit" in Judaism and Modernity (1993), Rose critiqued Derrida's Of Spirit (1987), arguing that his analysis of Heidegger's relation to Nazism relied in key instances on serious misreadings of Hegel, which allowed both Heidegger and Derrida to evade the importance of political history and modern law. In an extended "Note" to the essay, Rose raised similar objections to Derrida's subsequent readings of Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin, singling out his notion of the "mystical foundation of authority" as a centrally problematic.
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