James Ternent, Homerton

Biographical Information

 

I am originally from Leeds, and completed an MA in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 2024. My undergraduate dissertation focused on the overlapping conceptions of embodiment in Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  

 

Research Interests

I am interested primarily in German Idealist philosophy, especially the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and the ways in which it can be brought to bear on different contemporary domains of discourse. At the moment I am interested in reconstructing a robust theory of aesthetics on Fichte's behalf, and in looking at the sources of overlap between this and Romantic poetry, but I am also interested in theories of Intentionality and Intersubjectivity.

My current project focuses on Fichte's early influence on the English Romantics, specifically on the poetical work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Where Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria (1817) gave his most explicit account of the delineation between the 'primary' and 'secondary' imagination, a certain amount of ambiguity still surrounds these two terms. Coleridge famously went to Germany with the Wordsworths between 1798 and 1799, and on his travels brought back a number of volumes of Fichte's. My research focuses on the ways in which Coleridge's account of Imagination, especially as it is depicted in his poetic works pre-1817, was influenced by Fichte's conception of das Vermögen der Einbildungskraft, which he introduces towards the end of Part Two of his Grundlage der Gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (1794-5), one of the books that Coleridge read and annotated. This involves tracing Coleridge development both philosophically and historically; though he explicitly refuted Fichte in Chapter 9 of the Biographia, calling his conception of the 'I' a "crude egoismus", I believe that Fichte's influence on Coleridge was both stronger and more lasting than Coleridge himself would give credit for.

Selected Publications

• Forthcoming: “Conference Report on the XII Kongress of the Internationale Johann Gottlieb Fichte Gesellschaft”, in Fichteana 25
• 2026: “Bring Up the Bodies: A Merleau-Pontean Reading of Fichte on Embodiment and Intersubjectivity”, in Idealistic Studies 56(2): 71-95
• 2025: “Moving Mountains: Resituating the Sublime in Fichte’s Early Aesthetics”, in Symphilosophie 7: 261-84
• 2024: Review of Owen Ware: Fichte’s Moral Philosophy (2020) in Fichte-Studien 53: 322-6
• 2022: “Any colour you like: The Interplay of Fichte’s ‘I’, ‘not-I’, and Anstoß”, in Fichte-Studien 51(2): 441-62