Brandon Deadman

Brandon Deadman is a historian and philosopher specializing in the history of Platonism, German Idealism, esotericism, and phenomenology. He is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Chicago, in collaboration with the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. He is an advocate of teaching the Western Tradition as a dynamic whole (inclusive of the Near East), with a strong emphasis on traditional historiography and histoire événementielle.

Taking a History of Science approach to the History of Ideas, he studies the development of incommensurable metaphysical paradigms from tacitly divergent ontological commitments, leading to paradoxical disagreements over what is considered self-evident and thus inarguable: objectivity in science, absolute truth in metaphysics, certainty in logic and mathematics, sovereignty and legitimacy in politics, etc. Philosophically, he is interested in how subjects mediate such disputes by developing tools for raising their unconscious ontologies to self-consciousness, culminating in a critical comparative metaphysics. As a historian he examines the failures of European modernity to mediate between two opposed world-systems: the “idealists,” gnostics in search of the transcendent (and thus ready to reject any regime that does not provide or protect access to it), and the “materialists,” nihilists or quietists content with their imperfect or merely technical knowledge of the immanent.

His research to date has focused on Traditionalism (represented by René Guénon, Julius Evola, and Mircea Eliade) and the Conservative Revolutionaries, particularly Carl Schmitt. His future projects include a study of German Idealism as a form of Platonism, and a history of revolutionary or radical conservatism as the political wing of the Counter-Enlightenment. More broadly, he is interested in a revived Eliadean approach to the comparative study of religion. He also enjoys Wittgenstein and the history and philosophy of mathematics.