Hugh J. Silverman
Encyclopedia
Hugh J. Silverman is an American philosopher and cultural theorist
whose writing, lecturing, teaching, editing, and innovative international conferencing has participated in the development of a postmodern network that reaches around the world. He is Executive Director of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature and Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literary & Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University (New York, USA) where he is also affiliated with the Department of Art and the Department of European Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. He is Program Director for the Stony Brook Advanced Graduate Certificate in Art and Philosophy. He is also co-founder and co-director of the annual International Philosophical Seminar since 1991 in Alto Adige, Italy. From 1980-86, he served as Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
. His work draws upon deconstruction, hermeneutics, semiotics, phenomenology, aesthetics, art theory, film theory, and the archeology of knowledge.
(Finland) in 1997 and was Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Human Sciences (Vienna, Austria) in 1998. He received the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and was awarded an American Council of Learned Societies
(NEH) Fellowship in 1980-81.
Since 1980, he has held visiting professorships at the University of Warwick
and the University of Leeds
(UK), University of Torino and University of Rome-Tor Vergata (Italy), University of Vienna
and University of Klagenfurt
(Austria), University of Helsinki
and University of Tampere
(Finland), University of Sydney
and University of Tasmania
in Hobart (Australia), University of Trondheim (Norway), and University College, Cork (Ireland), University of Nice (Faculte des Lettres)(France).
He received his doctorate from Stanford University
(1973) with a Fulbright -French Government Scholarship to France (1971-71) and an FASCEA Scholarship in Paris (1968). After teaching at Stanford for a year, he joined the Stony Brook University Philosophy faculty in 1974 (with a joint title appointment in Comparative Literature).
, Jacques Derrida
, Mikel Dufrenne
, Roland Barthes
, Michel Foucault
, Jean-François Lyotard
, and is in dialogue with major contemporary figures such as Julia Kristeva
, Gianni Vattimo
, Mario Perniola
, and Carlo Sini. His writings draw upon the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche
, Edmund Husserl
, Martin Heidegger
, Hans-Georg Gadamer
, and Paul Ricoeur
.
His authored books include:
His more than twenty-three edited and co-edited books in English, German, Spanish, and Korean include studies of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Sartre, Piaget
, Žižek, hermeneutics, deconstruction
, and postmodern theory.
He is also known for his published translations and editions of Merleau-Ponty's writings into English.
As Editor of the Routledge Continental Philosophy series, volumes are both edited and introduced by Professor Silverman. Book titles include:
His published articles include:
Earlier series edited by Professor Silverman with a number of published books in each include Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and Literature (SUNY Press) and the Philosophy. Literature, Culture Series (Northwestern University Press). As series editor, he has published more than 50 books.
Cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...
whose writing, lecturing, teaching, editing, and innovative international conferencing has participated in the development of a postmodern network that reaches around the world. He is Executive Director of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature and Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literary & Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University (New York, USA) where he is also affiliated with the Department of Art and the Department of European Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. He is Program Director for the Stony Brook Advanced Graduate Certificate in Art and Philosophy. He is also co-founder and co-director of the annual International Philosophical Seminar since 1991 in Alto Adige, Italy. From 1980-86, he served as Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy is a philosophical society whose purpose is to promote the study of phenomenology and existentialism....
. His work draws upon deconstruction, hermeneutics, semiotics, phenomenology, aesthetics, art theory, film theory, and the archeology of knowledge.
Biography
Silverman was awarded the inaugural Fulbright-Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at the University of Vienna(Austria) for 2000-01 and the Fulbright-Distinguished Chair in Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 2009-10, as well as an Institute for Advanced Study Distinguished Fellowship at Michael J. Osborne Centre Institute for Advanced Study at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia) for June–July 2008. He was honored with the Helsinki Medal by the Rector of the University of HelsinkiUniversity of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki is a university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but was founded in the city of Turku in 1640 as The Royal Academy of Turku, at that time part of the Swedish Empire. It is the oldest and largest university in Finland with the widest range of disciplines available...
(Finland) in 1997 and was Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Human Sciences (Vienna, Austria) in 1998. He received the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and was awarded an American Council of Learned Societies
American Council of Learned Societies
The American Council of Learned Societies , founded in 1919, is a private nonprofit federation of seventy scholarly organizations.ACLS is best known as a funder of humanities research through fellowships and grants awards. ACLS Fellowships are designed to permit scholars holding the Ph.D...
(NEH) Fellowship in 1980-81.
Since 1980, he has held visiting professorships at the University of Warwick
University of Warwick
The University of Warwick is a public research university located in Coventry, United Kingdom...
and the University of Leeds
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...
(UK), University of Torino and University of Rome-Tor Vergata (Italy), University of Vienna
University of Vienna
The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...
and University of Klagenfurt
University of Klagenfurt
The University of Klagenfurt was founded in 1960 in Klagenfurt, Austria. It began as a College of Educational Studies . Since October 2004 the official German name is Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt in order to stress the intercultural connections between the Alpine regions and the Adriatic Sea...
(Austria), University of Helsinki
University of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki is a university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but was founded in the city of Turku in 1640 as The Royal Academy of Turku, at that time part of the Swedish Empire. It is the oldest and largest university in Finland with the widest range of disciplines available...
and University of Tampere
University of Tampere
The University of Tampere is a university in Tampere, Finland. It has 15,400 degree students and 2,100 employees. It was originally founded in 1925 in Helsinki as a Civic College , and from 1930 onwards it was known as a School of Social Sciences...
(Finland), University of Sydney
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
and University of Tasmania
University of Tasmania
The University of Tasmania is a medium-sized public Australian university based in Tasmania, Australia. Officially founded on 1 January 1890, it was the fourth university to be established in nineteenth-century Australia...
in Hobart (Australia), University of Trondheim (Norway), and University College, Cork (Ireland), University of Nice (Faculte des Lettres)(France).
He received his doctorate from Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
(1973) with a Fulbright -French Government Scholarship to France (1971-71) and an FASCEA Scholarship in Paris (1968). After teaching at Stanford for a year, he joined the Stony Brook University Philosophy faculty in 1974 (with a joint title appointment in Comparative Literature).
Intellectual links
Professor Silverman writes and teaches particularly in the areas of continental philosophy, aesthetics, postmodern ethics, and cultural / art / film / social theory. His work builds upon the writings of Maurice Merleau-PontyMaurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
, Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
, Mikel Dufrenne
Mikel Dufrenne
Mikel Dufrenne was a French philosopher and aesthetician. He is known as an author of existentialism, and is particularly noted for the work The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience .He encountered the work of Karl Jaspers while a prisoner of war, in a camp with Paul...
, Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
, Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
, Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
, and is in dialogue with major contemporary figures such as Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot...
, Gianni Vattimo
Gianni Vattimo
Gianteresio Vattimo, also known as Gianni Vattimo is an internationally recognized Italian author, philosopher, and politician. Many of his works have been translated into English.-Biography:...
, Mario Perniola
Mario Perniola
Mario Perniola is an internationally acclaimed Italian philosopher, professor of Aesthetics and author. Many of his works have been published in English.-Biography:...
, and Carlo Sini. His writings draw upon the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
, Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
, Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method .-Life:...
, and Paul Ricoeur
Paul Ricoeur
Paul Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation...
.
Publications
Silverman has published more than 25 books, over 100 articles and book chapters, and has delivered over 400 invited lectures in North and South America, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, Korea, and Taiwan.His authored books include:
- Textualities: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (Routledge, 1994), translated into German as Textualitäten: Zwischen Hermeneutik und Dekonstruktion (Turia + Kant, 1979), Italian as Testualità tra ermeneutica e deconstruzione with an introduction to the Italian Reader (Spirali, 2003), and Korean (2009) under the title of Textualities: Between Philosophy and the Arts.
- Inscriptions: After Phenomenology and Structuralism (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2nd ed., Northwestern University Press, 1997 ).
His more than twenty-three edited and co-edited books in English, German, Spanish, and Korean include studies of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Sartre, Piaget
Piaget
Piaget is surname of:* Edouard Piaget , Swiss entomologist* Jean Piaget , Swiss developmental psychologist* Paul Piaget , a Swiss rower...
, Žižek, hermeneutics, deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
, and postmodern theory.
He is also known for his published translations and editions of Merleau-Ponty's writings into English.
As Editor of the Routledge Continental Philosophy series, volumes are both edited and introduced by Professor Silverman. Book titles include:
- (1988/1997) Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty
- (1989) Derrida and Deconstruction
- (1990) Postmodernism—Philosophy and the Arts
- (1991) Gadamer and Hermeneutics
- (1994) Questioning Foundations: Truth / Subjectivity / Culture
- (1998) Cultural Semiosis: Tracing the Signifier
- (2000) Philosophy and Desire
- (2003) Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime
His published articles include:
- “Re-Reading Merleau-Ponty”. Telos 29 (Fall 1976). New York: Telos Press.
- "'Wenn ich Fremder bin, gibt es keine Fremden:' Reflexionen über postmoderne Fremde," trans. Daniel Weidner, Psychoanalyse und Philosophie, Mitteilung des Instituts für Wissenschaft und Kunst, 51. Jahrgang, no. 1 (1996), 10-16.
- "Modernism and Postmodernism," Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Supplement). New York: Macmillan, 1996.
- "Postmodernismi Ja Elokuva: Roskaelokuvissa Econ ja Derridan kanssa," trans. Anita Seppä, Synteesi: Taiteidenvälisen Tutkimuksen Aikakauslehti [Finland] (3, 1997), 89-97.
- "La scrittura avanti lo scrivere," trans. Alessandro Carrera. Intersezioni: Rivista di storia delle idee (Anno XIX, Dec. 1999), 417-420.
- "Le posmodernisme comme modernite 'fin de siecle' (ou: Le posmodernisme aux fins de l' 'in-difference')," trans. Arnaud Villani, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale [Special Issue: Philosophie Americaine Contemporaine], (Octobre-Decembre: No. 4, 2001), 67-78.
- "Living on (Borderlines): The Ethics of the Event of Lived Human Relations (Merleau-Ponty / Derrida)," Chiasmi International, 6 (2005),273-284.
- "Respons-abilities --- Between Three," Archivo di Filosofia - 2006 , ed. Marco Olivetti (Accademia Editoriale, 2006), 479-89.
- "Respons-abilities for Legacies: Jacques - on vous suit à travers vos textes," Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. Special Issue: Following Derrida: Legacies, Vol. 40, no 2 (June 2007), 297-306.
- "Tracing Responsibility: Levinas between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida," Journal of French Philosophy, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 2007), 81-96.
- "Rückkehr der Postmoderne: Die Macht der Gespenster," trans. Sabine Malicha and David Ender, Corpus, Thema #11: SPECTERS°.°GESPENSTER, (October 2008), 17 pp.http://www.corpusweb.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=977&Itemid=35
Book series editor
In addition to the Routledge Continental Philosophy Series, he is editor of the Continuum Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Cultural Theory [PACT] Series, Humanity Books Philosophy and Literary Theory series and co-editor of the Humanity Books Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences , he is also editor of the Rowman & Littlefield - Lexington Books New Frameworks for Continental Philosophy series and the IAPL Lexington Books TEXTURES: Philosophy / Literature / Culture book series.
Earlier series edited by Professor Silverman with a number of published books in each include Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and Literature (SUNY Press) and the Philosophy. Literature, Culture Series (Northwestern University Press). As series editor, he has published more than 50 books.