Allen Speight


Charles Allen Speight is a professor of philosophy and former chair of Department of Philosophy at Boston University.

Life and work

Speight began his academic life at St. John’s College in Maryland studying journalism with an interest in political coverage. He received his doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he completed his dissertation on Georg Hegel, Agency and tragedy in Hegel's philosophy of action, in 1993. Before coming to Boston University, He taught at St. Xavier University and the University of Chicago.
In the book Hegel, Literature, and the Problem of Agency, he argues that Hegel's treatment of three literary genres, tragedy, comedy, and the Romantic novel actually trace three moments of human agency: retrospectivity, theatricality and forgiveness. Therefore, Hegel's philosophical project The Phenomenology of Spirit is actually understanding the issue of human agency in the modern world. The book has been the subject of a number of reviews by Martin Donougho, Terry Pinkard, Andreas Großmann, Michael Baur, and Simon Lumsden.

Selected publications

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Translations

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Honors and awards