Karen Ng

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Director of Graduate Studies
Greg S. Allen Chancellor's Faculty Fellow

Description of Research

Karen Ng specializes in nineteenth-century European philosophy (esp. Hegel and German Idealism) and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Her book, Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic (Oxford University Press, 2020), won the 2021 Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize.The book explores the philosophical significance of the concept of life for Hegel’s philosophy, with an emphasis on his Science of Logic. 

In addition to her research in post-Kantian philosophy, she is also interested in the ongoing influence of Hegel and Marx for critical social theory, particularly as their legacies help us understand the relation between human beings and nature, possibilities and failures of mutual recognition, and conceptions of progress and critique. From 2023 to 2025, she will be an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy at the University of Potsdam.

She is currently at work on a number of new projects. One is a book tentatively titled, Species-Being: Ethical Life Between Humanity and Nature. Drawing on Hegel, German idealism, Marx, and critical theory, this project aims to show how the concept of species-being or Gattungswesen provides a framework for both understanding and assessing ethical life. She is also writing a book for the Cambridge Elements series on Hegel and the Frankfurt School. Together with Sacha Golob, she is editing the Cambridge Handbook of Continental Philosophy.

See Karen Ng’s academic website for more details about her research.