doc. Niklas Forsberg, PhD.

Doc. Niklas Forsberg, PhD., is a key researcher at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, an international research team based at the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, University of Pardubice. He is a Docent (≈ Associate Professor) in Theoretical Philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden, and in Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He received his PhD in 2005 at Uppsala University.

Research Interests:

• Ethics
• Philosophy of Language
• Aesthetics
• The relationship between Philosophy and Literature, and Philosophy and Film

Forsberg works broadly in philosophy, believing that too sharp and politically motivated delineations of philosophical “fields” (such as e.g. analytic vs. continental, exegetical vs. systematic, practical vs. theoretical, problem-oriented vs. meta-philosophical) are harmful to philosophy. Specific philosophical problems tend, if important and real, to love a company – so what we say and think in one “field” of philosophical discourse matters to other “fields.” Thus, his main research interest tends to focus on topics that can be found in the regions where philosophy’s three main parts – Ethics; Language, Logic and Metaphysics; and Aesthetics – meet, and they are all related to questions of philosophical methodology. His primary research focuses on issues surrounding the distinctive value of human life, and the ways in which this value may be either recognised or overlooked in both personal and political contexts. Phenomena that are of a special research interest to the Centre’s agenda include the various forms of the dislocation in our sense of shared humanity in relation to marginalised groups and under the circumstances of the rising populism, nationalism, religious conflict, climate crisis, migration and a changing European identity.

Selected Publications:

Forsberg Niklas: Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013 (paperback 2015).

Forsberg Niklas: Carver, Cavell and the Uncanniness of the Ordinary. New Literary History, 2018, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 1-22.

Forsberg Niklas: Thinking about a Word – Love, for Example. Metaphilosophy, 2017, vol. 48, No. 1–2, pp. 30-46. 

Forsberg Niklas: M and D and Me: Iris Murdoch and Stanley Cavell on Perfectionism and Self-Transformation. Iride, 2017, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 361-372.

Forsberg Niklas: Iris Murdoch on Love. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love, edited by Grau, Christopher and Smuth, Aaron. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.