Professor Thomas Ahnert (MA, PhD, FRHistS)

Professor of Intellectual History; History

Biography

Background

I read history at St John’s College, Cambridge, graduating with a PhD in 1999. I then worked in the Munich office of an international management consultancy, before accepting a three-year research fellowship at Edinburgh which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I was appointed to a lectureship in History in 2005, and subsequently promoted to Senior Lecturer, Reader, and Professor.

I have been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Max-Planck Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen. In 2010 – 2011 I was the Rosanna and Charles Jaffin Founders’ Circle Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2019 I was a Shinhan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yonsei University in South Korea 

From 2022 to 2025 I am PI on a research project, funded jointly by the AHRC and the DFG, on 'Rethinking Enlightenment: the Reception of John Locke in Germany'.

Responsibilities & affiliations

Undergraduate teaching

  • Intellectual History from Montesquieu to Marx (UG Option)

  • Enlightenment Scotland, c. 1690 – c. 1800 (Special Subject)

  • War, Commerce, Liberty, and Empire: European Political Thought from Mandeville to Marx (c. 1700 - c. 1850) (Special Subject)

  • Early Modern History: a Connected World

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Postgraduate teaching

  • The European Enlightenments, 1670 - 1820 (PG course)

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

Areas accepting Research Students in:

Early modern European intellectual history, c. 1600 - 1830

Process of intellectual transmission and reception

The European Enlightenments

Religion and secularisation in the early modern period

The intellectual history of early modern philosophy

Past PhD students supervised

I have supervised (as primary, co-, or second supervisor) more than twenty successfully completed PhD dissertations 

Research summary

 

Places: 

  • Britain & Ireland
  • Europe
  • Scotland

Themes: 

  • Culture
  • Ideas
  • Medicine, Science & Technology
  • Politics
  • Religion

Periods: 

  • Early Modern
  • Eighteenth Century

 

I work on the intellectual history of early modern Europe, focusing mainly on the German-speaking lands and Britain from c. 1650 to c. 1820. One of my aims has been to integrate the discussion of early modern religious thought into intellectual history more generally. Another has been to examine the connections between different intellectual disciplines in the early modern period, when any one area of inquiry and debate, such as religion, science, or morality, cannot be understood in isolation from others. This approach is reflected in my first book, a study of the early Enlightenment thinker Christian Thomasius, who wrote on matters as diverse as heresy, history, Roman Law, morality and natural science.

I have published articles and book chapters on a range of subjects such as religion and Enlightenment, the history of toleration, notions of punishment in early modern moral philosophy, Enlightenment responses to the intellectual heritage of classical antiquity, and the reception of Newtonian science in Germany. I have edited and translated several early modern texts on law and moral philosophy. I co-edited, with the late Susan Manning, a volume of essays on Character, Self and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment. My most recent monograph is The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690 - 1805.

Current research interests

I am currently working on two related areas of research. One is a new interpretation of philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment. ‘Philosophy’ is regarded as central to the Enlightenment, in Scotland as much as elsewhere in Europe. But unlike many previous accounts, my focus is not on individual thinkers, but on the transformation of philosophy as an intellectual discipline at universities, from 1690 to 1830. The project will be based on abundant, but neglected primary sources, printed and manuscript, which were used for instructing students. As I will show, a key concern which informed this transformation was the notion of philosophy as a ‘culture of the mind’. The other is a three-year research project, funded jointly by the AHRC and the DFG, on the reception of John Locke's thought in eighteenth-century Germany, for which I am a Principal Investigator. Few figures have been more closely associated with the so-called ‘period of Enlightenment’ in the eighteenth century than the Englishman John Locke (1632 – 1704). The engagement with his writings and ideas has often been used as a way of measuring the sophistication of a particular intellectual culture, and its progress towards some sort of ‘modernity’. But in the German-speaking lands, it has been argued, Locke’s thought was slow to take effect: it is said that Locke was ‘a quiet subterranean force’ in German philosophy in the first half of the eighteenth century, as the impact of British thinkers was blunted by the supposed dominance of a Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophical school, which was entrenched in curricula at German universities. Later, it is said, Locke’s ideas became part of a synthesis with Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism, which emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century. The result of this belated reception was a hybrid Anglo-German philosophy, which was eventually challenged and superseded by Immanuel Kant’s ‘critical philosophy’. The purpose of this project is to move beyond this prevailing, but rather schematic view of the impact of Lockean texts and arguments in German intellectual culture. It will question essentialised views of Locke’s thought, of ‘British empiricism’ and of ‘German rationalism’, and instead explore the various different, and selective appropriations of Locke’s writings by a range of German thinkers.

Past research interests

I have worked extensively on the question of the intellectual history of religion in the Enlightenment, as well as the reception of Newton in eighteenth-century Germany.

Knowledge exchange

Watch a short video of Dr Ahnert speaking about his rearch interests - Media Hopper

Current project grants

2022 - 25: 'Rethinking Enlightenment: the Reception of John Locke in Germany' (AHRC-DFG)

Monographs

The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690 - 1805 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: faith and the reform of learning in the thought of Christian Thomasius (Rochester, N.Y: University of Rochester Press, 2006).

 

Editions/Translations

Christian Wolff. The Law of Nations treated according to the Scientific Method, edited and with a revised translation by Thomas Ahnert (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2017).

Christian Thomasius. Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence, with Selections from Foundations of the Law of Nature & Nations, edited and translated by Thomas Ahnert (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011).

Johann Gottlieb Heineccius. A Methodical System of Universal Law: Or, the Laws of Nature and Nations: With Supplements and a Discourse by George Turnbull, co-edited with Peter Schröder (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008).

Christian Thomasius. Essays on Church, State, and Politics, co-edited and -translated with Ian Hunter and Frank Grunert (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007).

 

Edited Collections and Journal Special Issues

Character, Self and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment, co-edited with Susan Manning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

'Nicholas Phillipson and the Sciences of Humankind in Enlightenment Scotland'. Special issue, History of European Ideas 48/1 (2022), pp. 1 - 65. 

 

Selected Articles and Chapters

‘The Philosophy Curriculum at Scottish Universities in the Eighteenth Century’, in: Aaron Garrett and James Harris (eds.), Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume II: Method, Metaphysics, Mind, Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 1-52.

'The Metaphysics of Moral Entities', in: Knud Haakonssen and Ian Hunter (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Pufendorf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 90-109.

'Another querelle. The Usus Modernus Pandectarum and the Constitution of the Holy Roman Empire around 1700', in: Thomas Wallnig and Ines Peper (eds.), Central European Pasts. Old and New in the Intellectual Cuture of Habsburg Europe, 1700 - 1750 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022), pp. 292-310. 

'Scotland and the European Republic of Letters around 1700', co-authored with Martha McGill, in: Alexander Broadie (ed.), A History of Scottish Philosophy: Scottish Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 73-93.

'Philosophy and Theology in the mid-eighteenth Century', in: David Fergusson and Mark Elliott (eds.), The History of Scottish Theology: The Early Enlightenment to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 56-68.

'Newton in the German-speaking Lands', in: Scott Mandelbrote and Helmut Pulte (eds.), The Reception of Isaac Newton in Europe (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), pp. 41-58.

'Forum: The German Enlightenment', co-authored with E. Décultot, S. Grote, I. Michelangelo-D'Aprile, A. Lifschitz, German history, 35(4) (2017), pp. 588–602. 

'Soul and Mind', in: Aaron Garrett (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Philosophy (London and New York: Taylor & Francis, 2014), pp. 297-319.

'Samuel Pufendorf and Religious Intolerance in the Early Enlightenment', in: Jon Parkin and Tim Stanton (eds.), Natural Law and Toleration in the Early Enlightenment. Proceedings of the British Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy, 2013), pp. 15-33

'Religion and Morality', in: James Harris (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 638-657.

'The Moral Education of Mankind: Character and Religious Moderatism in the Sermons of Hugh Blair', in: Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning (eds.), Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 67-84.

'Fortschrittsgeschichte und Religiöse Aufklärung. William Robertson und die Deutung aussereuropäischer Kulturen', in: Wolfgang Hardtwig, Die Aufklärung und Ihre Weltwirkung (=Geschichte und Gesellschaft special issue 23) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), pp. 101-122.

'Hutcheson and the Heathen Moralists', Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 8 (2010), pp. 51 – 62. 

'Epicureanism and the Transformation of Natural Law in the Early German Enlightenment', in: Neven Leddy and Avi Lifschitz (eds.), Epicurus in the Enlightenment: Mode d'emploi. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), pp. 53-68.

'Clergymen as Polite Philosophers. Douglas and the Conflict between Moderates and Orthodox in the Scottish Enlightenment', Intellectual History Review, 18 (2008), pp. 375-383.

'The "Science of Man" in the Moral and Political Philosophy of George Turnbull, 1698-1748', Acta Philosophica Fennica , 83 (2007), pp. 89-104.

'Enthusiasm and Enlightenment: the reform of faith and the reform of philosophy in the thought of Christian Thomasius', Modern Intellectual History, 2 (2005), pp. 153-177. 

'Newtonianism in early Enlightenment Germany, c. 1720 to 1750: metaphysics and the critique of dogmatic philosophy', Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 35 (2004), pp. 471-91. 

'The soul, moral philosophy and natural religion in the Scottish Enlightenment', Eighteenth Century Thought, 2 (2004), pp. 233-253.

'De Sympathia et Antipathia Rerum: Natural Law, Religion and the Rejection of Mechanistic Science in the Works of Christian Thomasius', in: Tim Hochstrasser and P. Schröder (eds.), Early Modern Natural Law Theories: Contexts and Strategies in the Early Enlightenment. International Archives of the History of Ideas 186 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), pp. 257-277.

'Nullius in verba: Autorität und Experiment in der Frühen Neuzeit. Das Beispiel Johann Christoph Sturms (1635-1703)', Zeitsprünge, 1/7 (2003), pp. 604-618.

'The relationship between the Prince and the Church in the Thought of Christian Thomasius', in: Ian Hunter and D. Saunders (eds.), Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty. Moral Right and State Authority in Early Modern Political Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 91-106.

'The Varieties of Contexts in Early Stuart Intellectual History', Historical Journal, 44 (2001), pp. 565-577

'Roman Law in early Enlightenment Germany. The case of Christian Thomasius' De Aequitate Cerebrina Legis Secundae Codicis de Rescindenda Venditione (1706)', Ius Commune: Zeitschrift für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte, XXIV (1997), pp. 153-170.

 

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