Intertwinings : Exploring Intersubjectivity, Embodiment, and Alterity with James Mensch

This anthology offers a comprehensive introduction to the contemporary phenomenologist James R. Mensch, exploring his oeuvre and thought. Mensch’s extensive body of work spans several decades, often concretely engaging with three intersecting conditions of dialogue: Alterity, Intersubjectivity, and Embodiment. By intertwining these concepts, Mensch exposes the ever-threatening soliloquy of modern reason, calling upon us to deconstruct the conflation of human freedom with sovereignty that figures at the core of Western political thought and practice. The contributors to this book pick up these themes and explore the fragility and potentiality of our conceptions of discourse, dialogue, and the political. Moreover, and in applying Mensch’s idea of a post-foundational phenomenology, this anthology honors Mensch’s expansive work, which spans key thinkers such as Husserl, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Patočka, and delves into subjects ranging from perception and time to ethics and ecology. The volume is meant for students and researchers and explores these three interwoven conditions in various ways.

Michael Staudigl

Michael Staudigl teaches philosophy at the Department of Philosophy (University of Vienna) where he is also a member of the research center “Religion and transformation in contemporary society.” Granted several research fellowships, he worked in Freiburg, Prague, Louvain-la-Neuve, and New York. He was a scientific assistant at the psycho-traumatological unit ESRA in Vienna from 2000–2002, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM, Vienna) from 2003–2010 and held an APART fellowship at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2003-2006). As of 2007 onwards, he has directed several research grants funded by the FWF (Austrian Science Funds), most recently the bilateral project "The Return of Religion as a Challenge for Thought" (FWF I 2785 ― with B. Klun, Slovenia) and the stand-alone project "Secularism and its Discontents: Toward a Phenomenology Religious Violence" (FWF P 29599).

Research Focus: Continental philosophy, contemporary French philosophy, phenomenology (classical and contemporary), interdisciplinary violence studies, social philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of religion and religious violence, philosophy of the social sciences.

Selected Book Publications:  Phänomenologie der Gewalt (Springer, 2015, Revised and enlarged English transl. forthcoming); Co-Editor, Konturen europäischer Gastlichkeit (Velbrück, 2016); Editor, Gesichter der Gewalt (Fink, 2014); Editor, Phenomenologies of Violence (Brill, 2013); Co-Editor., Bedingungslos? Zum Gewaltpotential unbedingter Ansprüche im  Kontext politischer Theorie (Velbrück, 2014); Editor, Alfred Schutz and Religion (Special Issue Human Studies 40, no. 4, 2017); Co-Editor, Beyond Myth and Enlightenment: Reconsidering Religion (Special Issue of Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 17, no. 2, 2018); Editor, Phenomenologies of Religious Violence (Special Issue of Continental Philosophy Review 53, no. 3, 2020); Co-Editor, Phenomenology and the Post-secular Turn (Routledge 2021); Phänomenologien des Politischen (Springer VS 2024); Co-Editor, In the shadows of religious experience: Hostility, violence, revenge (Special Issue of Religions 13/14, 2022)

Barbara Weber

Dr. Barbara Weber is a Full Professor at the University of British Columbia, Chair of the Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program, and an Adjunct Professor at the UBC Philosophy Department. In 2021 she received an Honorary Professorship by the International Institute for Hermeneutics (University of Warsaw). Prior to her arrival at UBC, Dr. Weber held the Professorship for Civic Engagement and Values Education at the Philosophy Department of the University of Regensburg. 

Research Focus: Phenomenological and hermeneutic theories on embodiment, empathy, reason (Vernunft), Human Rights philosophies, contemporary political philosophy, and philosophies around time, beginning, and childhood. 

Recent Book Publications: Zwischen Vernunft und Mitgefühl: Jürgen Habermas und Richard Rorty im Dialog über Wahrheit, politische Kultur und Menschenrechte (Freiburg: Alber, 2013);  Vernunft, Mitgefühl und Körperlichkeit: Eine phänomenologische Rekonstruktion des politischen Raumes (Freiburg: Alber,  2013); Philosophieren mit Kindern zum Thema Menschenrechte: Vernunft und Mitgefühl als Grundvoraussetzungen einer demokratischen Dialogkultur (Freiburg: Alber, 2013); Thinking, Childhood and Time: Contemporary Perspectives on the Politics of Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020, Eds.),  Drapalo, K., Weber, B., Węc, K., & Wierciński, A. (Eds.). (in press). Subject, identity, and care: Educational (Dis)closures (Brill/Fink Publisher, 2024, Eds.).

Karel Novotný

Dr. Karel Novotný is a Research Professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy, and a Full Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University in Prague. He is coordinator of the Erasmus Master Mundus “German and French Philosophy in Europe (EuroPhilosophie)” program at Charles University and co-director of the Central-European Institute of Philosophy with Professor Hans Rainer Sepp.

Research Focus: Classical and new phenomenological theories of phenomenality, embodiment, world, and nature.

Recent Monograph Publications: La genèse d’une hérésie. Monde, corps et histoire dans la pensée de Jan Patočka (Paris: Vrin, 2012), Neue Konzepte der Phänomenalität. Essais zur Subjektivität und Leiblichkeit des Erscheinens (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2012); Relevance subjektivity. Tělo a duše z hlediska fenomenologie afektivity (Červený Kostelec: Pavel Mervart, 2016; Welt und Leib. Zu einigen Grundmotiven der Phänomenologie (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann); Život a svět. Fenomenologie Jana Patočky (Červený Kostelec: Pavel Mervart, 2023)