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The Researchers

The project team include Emma MasonLink opens in a new window and Nataliya Pratsovyta in English and Comparative Literary Studies; Tobias KeilingLink opens in a new window, Eileen JohnLink opens in a new window, and Karen SimecekLink opens in a new window in Philosophy; and other colleagues and graduates working in the field of Philosophy and Literature.

The Challenge

The project explores poetry as a form of philosophical practice and ethical formation in relation to Jewish and Christian theology. We are interested late nineteenth and early twentieth-century phenomenologists who wrote with and through poetry as a foundation for theological and ethical inquiry into the possibility of empathy. Amidst the horror and violence of this period, Edmund Husserl developed the philosophical study of conscious experience in conversation with Jewish and Christian theology. But it was in the work of his students that these questions were developed. In essays, poems, theological and phenomenological reflections, philosophers including Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, Adolf Reinach, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Gerda Walther argued for poetry as a kind of mystical cognition and contemplative perception that might cultivate and enact empathy. The influence of their work on later philosopher-poets is extensive, including the writing of Simone Weil.

Our Approach

While Husserl's students are not overlooked by philosophers, their poetry is rarely read by literary critics, and many of the ideas at the heart of their work—intuition, mysticism, contemplation, faith—can feel alien in a largely secular academic sphere. We seek to rethink these writers and their ideas as the basis for empathy and we ask how the configuration of philosophy, poetry, and theology in their work might speak to our current moment of war and intolerance.