Alia Al-Saji | |
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Institutions | McGill University, Emory University |
Main interests | Feminist Phenomenology |
Alia Al-Saji is James McGill Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. [1] Her work focuses on bringing 20th century phenomenology and French philosophy into dialogue with critical race and feminist theories. [1] Al-Saji believes that feminist phenomenology must take an intersectional approach to its work, one that accounts for the fact that gender cannot be treated in a vacuum apart from other axes of oppression. [2]
Al-Saji received a bachelor's degree from McMaster University in 1993, a master's degree in philosophy from KU Leuven in 1995, and a doctorate in philosophy from Emory University in 2002. [1] After receiving her doctorate, Al-Saji accepted a teaching position at McGill University, an institution she is still at. [1] In her time at McGill (and previously, as a graduate student,) Al-Saji published a number of papers in peer-reviewed journals. [1] She is also working on a manuscript, tentatively titled The Time of Difference: Thinking memory, perception and ethics with Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. [1]
Al-Saji is the editor of the feminist philosophy section of the journal Philosophy Compass . [3] She is a co-editor of the Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy. Al-Saji has held a number of fellowships, including one at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University in 2012, where she carried out research related to the theme of time, [4] and one at The Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. [5]
Much of Al-Saji's work has represented an effort to forge links between 20th century phenomenology and French philosophy and critical race and feminist theories. [1] A significant theme of her work has been the question of time. [4] Al-Saji's research has two distinct tracks: the first looks at questions of embodiment, memory, and intersubjectivity, and the second attempts to develop a phenomenology of "cultural racism," especially through feminist analysis of the depiction of Muslim women in modern western contexts. [4] [6] Al-Saji's work has touched upon the work of many scholars before her, including Henri Bergson, [7] [8] Edmund Husserl, [1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, [1] Jean Paul Sartre, [1] and many others, although her work has primarily focused on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. [1] [9]
Henri-Louis Bergson was a French philosopher, who was influential in the traditions of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War, but also after 1966 when Gilles Deleuze published Le Bergsonisme. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.
Phenomenology is the philosophical study of objectivity and reality as subjectively lived and experienced. It seeks to investigate the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear to the subject, and to explore the meaning and significance of the lived experiences.
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examines the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One (1977), which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions (1982) can be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible, and in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1999), Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air.
Neurophenomenology refers to a scientific research program aimed to address the hard problem of consciousness in a pragmatic way. It combines neuroscience with phenomenology in order to study experience, mind, and consciousness with an emphasis on the embodied condition of the human mind. The field is very much linked to fields such as neuropsychology, neuroanthropology and behavioral neuroscience and the study of phenomenology in psychology.
Existential phenomenology encompasses a wide range of thinkers who take up the view that philosophy must begin from experience like phenomenology, but argues for the temporality of personal existence as the framework for analysis of the human condition.
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women. Existentialism is a philosophical and cultural movement which holds that the starting point of philosophical thinking must be the individual and the experiences of the individual, that moral thinking and scientific thinking together are not sufficient for understanding all of human existence, and, therefore, that a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to understand human existence. This philosophy analyzes relationships between the individual and things, or other human beings, and how they limit or condition choice.
Phenomenology of Perception is a 1945 book about perception by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which the author expounds his thesis of "the primacy of perception". The work established Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body, and is considered a major statement of French existentialism.
Diana Hilary Coole is Professor of Political and Social Theory in the School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck, University of London. Her main field of research covers, broadly, contemporary continental philosophy with special interests in poststructuralism, and feminism and gender in political thought. Coole also sits on the editorial boards of several journals including Contemporary Political Theory and the European Journal of Political Theory.
20th-century French philosophy is a strand of contemporary philosophy generally associated with post-World War II French thinkers, although it is directly influenced by previous philosophical movements.
John Russon is a Canadian philosopher, working primarily in the tradition of Continental Philosophy. In 2006, he was named Presidential Distinguished Professor at the University of Guelph, and in 2011 he was the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute's Canadian Lecturer to India.
The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) is a philosophical society whose initial purpose was to promote the study of phenomenology and existentialism but has since expanded to a wide array of contemporary philosophical pursuits, including critical theory, feminist philosophy, poststructuralism, critical race theory, and increasingly non-Eurocentric philosophies. SPEP was created in 1962 by American philosophers who were interested in Continental philosophy and were dissatisfied with the analytic dominance of the American Philosophical Association. It has since emerged as the second most important philosophical society in the United States. Alan D. Schrift and Shannon Sullivan are the current Executive Co-Directors of SPEP.
Renaud Barbaras is a French contemporary philosopher. An École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud alumnus, he is Chair of Contemporary Philosophy in the University of Paris 1, Sorbonne.
Leonard "Len" Lawlor is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental philosophy.
Mauro Carbone is an Italian philosopher. Since 2009, he has been a full professor at the Faculté de Philosophie of the Jean Moulin University Lyon 3 in Lyon, France. From 2012 to 2017, he has been a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Edward S. Casey is an American philosopher and university professor. He has published several volumes on phenomenology, philosophical psychology, and the philosophy of space and place. His work is widely cited in contemporary continental philosophy. He is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Stony Brook University in New York and distinguished visiting faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
Yvanka B. Raynova is a Bulgarian philosopher, feminist, editor, translator, and publisher. She is full professor of contemporary philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and director of the Institute for Axiological Research in Vienna. She elaborated a post-personalist hermeneutic phenomenology based on some gnostic ideas. Her works include studies on continental philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, axiology, feminist philosophy, intercultural philosophy, religious studies, and translation studies.
"Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality" is a 1980 essay by political philosopher and feminist Iris Marion Young which examines differences in feminine and masculine norms of movement in the context of a gendered and embodied phenomenological perspective. Young's essay uses ideas from philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to examine how perceptions of the female body relate to task performance and confidence.
Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann is a German sociologist.
Embodiment theory speaks to the ways that experiences are enlivened, materialized, and situated in the world through the body. Embodiment is a relatively amorphous and dynamic conceptual framework in anthropological research that emphasizes possibility and process as opposed to definitive typologies. Margaret Lock identifies the late 1970s as the point in the social sciences where we see a new attentiveness to bodily representation and begin a theoretical shift towards developing an ‘Anthropology of the Body.’