Professor Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies, Penn State University, is one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of the thought of Jacques Derrida and of Emmanuel Levinas, and a leading scholar in African-American Studies.   Besides editing three academic journals (Eco-ethica, Levinas Studies, and Critical Philosophy of Race), and having co-edited several scholarly books, and authored two books on Heidegger and a book on Jean-Paul Sartre (which has been translated into Korean and Chinese), he has published numerous articles and delivered numerous papers and keynote addresses in America and around the world in contemporary thought.

Hannah Arendt, beyond her worldwide reputation as a philosopher and political commentator, is a recognized Jewish intellectual and political thinker owing to the impact of her controversial 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was first published serially in “The New Yorker” in the same year.  Emmanuel Levinas, also a recognized world-class philosopher, though lacking Arendt’s recognition in the Jewish community, is also a major Jewish intellectual, and recognized as such in France and Europe more generally.  Beyond this recognition in his own religious community, his reputation is ensured as the foremost European philosopher of ethics in the 20^th century, having reoriented philosophy radically toward establishing “ethics as first philosophy.”

Supported by the UB Humanities Institute.