Dmitri V. Nikulin

Dmitri Nikulin (b. 1962) is a philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York City, New York, US. He has been a visiting professor at the École pratique des hautes études, Paris and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. He has been a Fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Tübingen, Heidelberg, and Bonn-Bad Godesberg, Germany, at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where he worked with Alvin Plantinga, and at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg, Germany.

Dmitri V. Nikulin
Nikulin in 2009

Philosophical Work

Nikulin has written extensively on a number of different yet intrinsically connected themes.

Ancient Philosophy

Nikulin’s work in ancient philosophy addresses ontology, mathematics, and science in Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Proclus. In his work on philosophy of nature, he argues that the realm of the geometrical in ancient philosophy was considered intermediate between the thinkable and the physical, and was represented by imagination. In early modernity, geometry becomes identified with the mathematically measured and uniformly extended matter, which substitutes nature, making it malleable, measurable, and transformable through human cognitive, social, and productive activities.

Dialogue

In his work on dialogue, Nikulin argues that dialogue, which is always meaningful, even if not finalized at any moment, constitutes the very human condition. In this sense, to be is to be in dialogue. Dialogue, then, is the locus of being and well-being with others, whereas dialectic, which arises as a logical imitation and appropriation of dialogue, intends to be productive of truth.

History and Memory

Nikulin’s work on history and memory is a critique of the modern understanding of history as universal and teleological, moving progressively forward toward an end. Instead, he shows that history embraces multiple histories and is constituted by the historical proper, which consists of facts, names, and events and needs to be kept and transmitted, and the accompanied narrative, which in principle we always should be able to rethink according to a shared social and political understanding.

Comedy

Nikulin stresses that comedy allows to reconsider the notion of subjectivity not as tragic, which it becomes in modernity, but as integrated with others through common action. Comedy is philosophically significant in that the structure of its plot is isomorphic with the structure of a philosophical argument. The political significance of comedy lies in its capacity to bring justice and well-being by resolving a conflict through the common effort of all the participants, among whom the comic hero, who represents the poor and dispossessed, plays the main role and becomes the public thinker.

Modern Subjectivity

Nikulin’s philosophy is a sustained criticism of the modern conception of subjectivity that emerges most explicitly in Descartes and Kant and remains prominent in contemporary philosophy. In his Critique of Bored Reason, Nikulin offers a critical reconstruction of the concept of the modern subject as a historical, cultural, and philosophical product, defined by its universality, autonomy, and the exclusion of others. Boredom, then, can be considered as the inalienable property or proprium of the lonely, isolated, and monological subject, which defines our modern condition. Nikulin seeks to offer an alternative to the modern tragic subject by articulating a conception of human engagement based on dialogue and comedy as philosophically important and politically progressive.

Books

• Metaphysik und Ethik. Theoretische und praktische Philosophie in Antike und Neuzeit. München: C. H. Beck, 1996. ISBN 3406411665
• Matter, Imagination and Geometry: Ontology, Natural Philosophy, and Mathematics in Plotinus, Proclus, and Descartes. Ashgate, 2002. ISBN 978-0754615743
• On Dialogue. Lexington, 2006. ISBN 978-0-7391-1139-0
• Dialectic and Dialogue. Stanford University Press, 2010. ISBN 9780804770163
• Comedy, Seriously: A Philosophical Study. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ISBN 978-1-349-49051-6
• The Concept of History. Bloomsbury, 2017. ISBN 9781474269117
• Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity. Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN 9780190662363
• Facets of Modernity: Reflections on Fractured Subjectivity. Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. ISBN 978-1-78661-505-3
• Critique of Bored Reason: On the Confinement of the Modern Condition. Columbia University Press, 2022. ISBN 9780231189071

Edited volumes

• The Other Plato. SUNY Press, 2012. ISBN 9781438444109
• Memory: A History. Oxford University Press, 2015. ISBN 9780199793839
• Philosophy and Political Power in Antiquity (co-edited with Cinzia Arruzza). Brill, 2016. ISBN 978-90-04-32461-9
• Productive Imagination: Its History, Meaning and Significance (co-edited with Saulius Geniusas). Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. ISBN 978-1-78660-431-6