I joined Royal Holloway in September 2017 from the University of Liverpool, having been a Humboldt Fellow at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster from 2014-2016. In 2017-18 I was a EURIAS Fellow at ENS Lyon, researching Franco-German intellectual exchange in the 1830s, particularly the controversy between Schelling and Victor Cousin, and last year I undertook a British Academy fellowship for a project, 'Caring for Plants in Modern Philosophy, 1746-1806', based on an AHRC network on the place of plants in the philosophy of nature. I am also currently lead for the University's "Assessment Futures" strategic project.

I research mainly on the history of philosophy, particularly French, German and Dutch traditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Following the publication of Schelling's Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity by Oxford University Press in 2013, my research on German philosophy has tended to focus on Schellingian Naturphilosophie, as well as further investigations into his philosophy of language. This led (with Benjamin Berger) to the The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801: Nature and Identity, as well as a textbook of Schelling's writings: The Schelling Reader (Bloomsbury). I am currently interested in interrogating the place of plants in philosophies of nature past and present in both a AHRC network and a British Academy fellowship, and this has led me to think about two twentieth-century botanists at the intersection of philosophy and the life sciences: Agnes Arber and Wilhelm Troll.

I am also interested in the eighteenth-century origins of German Idealism and Romanticism, particularly the philosophy of Francois Hemsterhuis, and have published a monograph, Francois Hemsterhuis and the Writing of Philosophy and co-translated his writings into English for the very first time in the three-volumes, The Edinburgh Edition of the Philosophical Works of François Hemsterhuis.

My work on the French tradition is directly specifically at French historiography of philosophy both Victor Cousin's eclectic school, as well as the twentieth-century historiographies of Gueroult and Alquie. I have co-edited with Mark Sinclair The Oxford Handbook to Modern French Philosophy, led work on the volume Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France and have just submitted to Oxford University Press an edition of Victor Cousin's shorter writings (Philosophical Fragments).

For more of a sense of my research, see further the various project and publication websites listed below:

(a)   Publications: https://royalholloway.academia.edu/DanielWhistler

(b)   UK Schelling Research Group (British Academy Project, 2016 -17): http://schelling.org.uk/

(c)    The Philosophical Life of Plants (AHRC project, 2019-21): https://www.plantphilosophy.org.uk/