11 Facts About Nikolas Kompridis

Nikolas Kompridis is a Canadian philosopher and political theorist.

Nikolas Kompridis's major published work addresses the direction and orientation of Frankfurt School critical theory; the legacy of philosophical romanticism; and the aesthetic dimension of politics.

In Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future, Nikolas Kompridis argues that Habermasian critical theory, which has in recent decades become the main paradigm of that tradition, has largely severed its own roots in German idealism, while neglecting modernity's distinctive relationship to time and the utopian potential of critique.

Nikolas Kompridis has published a number of essays arguing for his own conceptions of cultural change, receptivity, critique, recognition and reason, and has engaged in written debates about these and other issues with critical theorists including Amy Allen, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib.

Nikolas Kompridis has written that he sees critical theory, and critique in general, as implicitly romantic in its self-understanding, and much of his scholarly work reflects this concern.

Nikolas Kompridis's edited collection, Philosophical Romanticism, includes essays on diverse themes in romanticism from philosophers such as Albert Borgmann, Stanley Cavell, Hubert Dreyfus, Richard Eldridge, Robert Pippin and others, as well as his own contributions.

In 2009, Nikolas Kompridis published a chapter on Romanticism in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, articulating his view of the relationship between romanticism and social change, and particularly the work of the social critic.

The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought is a collection of essays, edited by Nikolas Kompridis, which explores the connections between aesthetics and democratic politics.

Nikolas Kompridis has lectured on film, on the relationship between cultural memory, diversity, and the arts, and has discussed music and philosophy with his former teacher, the composer Martin Bresnick, in a discussion broadcast on ABC's Big Ideas program.

In 2011, Nikolas Kompridis guest-edited and contributed to a special issue of the journal Ethics and Global Politics on "A Politics of Receptivity".

Nikolas Kompridis therefore proposes an inter-disciplinary "counter science of the human" to provide alternatives to naturalistic assumptions about identity, which predominate in the natural sciences, and which work in concert with the wider culture of individualism to erode, and preclude, other understandings of what it means to be human.