Veroni Lecture: Dan Zahavi

Kent State University Veroni Memorial Lectures in Philosophy and the Humanities

Dan Zahavi

Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research
the University of Copenhagen, Denmark

We, You, and I

Wednesday, April 17, 2024, 7 p.m.
Location: CVA 165
Dessert Reception to Follow

During the past few decades, collective intentionality has been intensively explored in various disciplines including social, cognitive and developmental psychology, economics, sociology, political theory, anthropology, ethology, and the social neurosciences. Much of the empirical work in these areas has drawn inspiration from and relied on the theoretical analyses of a handful of analytic philosophers, notably Searle, Bratman, Gilbert, and Tuomela, whose work have often gravitated around the question of whether and how collective intentions differ from aggregations of individual intentions. Whereas the contemporary debate on collective intentionality in analytic philosophy has lasted a few decades, questions concerning the nature of we, and the relation between self, intersubjectivity, and community are obviously far older. We can find a particular rich discussion of these topics in early phenomenology. Indeed, while starting out with an interest in the individual mind, phenomenologists began their exploration of dyadic forms of interpersonal relations shortly before the start of World War I and were already deeply engaged in extensive analyses of collective forms of intentionality a few years later. In my talk, I will present some core insights from this early debate, and in particular look at the contributions of Husserl, Walther, and Schutz. 

Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His primary research area is phenomenology and philosophy of mind, and their intersection with empirical disciplines such as psychiatry and psychology. In addition to a number of scholarly works on the phenomenology of Husserl, Prof. Zahavi has written on the nature of selfhood, self-consciousness, intersubjectivity, empathy, and most recently on topics in social ontology. Since 2020, Prof. Zahavi has been the principal investigator on a 5-year research project entitled “Who are We?” which is supported by the European Research Council and the Carlsberg Foundation. His writings have been translated into more than 30 languages.