James Dodd is the Werner Marx Chair in Phenomenology and Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research.

Concentrations: Husserl; Heidegger; phenomenology. I turned to philosophy when I realized that there were common questions that drive very different kinds of disciplines, from anthropology to mathematics, from history to the natural sciences. I became dedicated to philosophy, both as a researcher and a teacher, when I learned just how powerfully and rigorously these questions could be articulated in philosophical conversation. Philosophy does not replace the diversity of intellectual pursuit, but it does illuminate the common horizon of questioning that all of these disciplines share--for they all equally engage fundamental questions such as "Who are we?" "What is just?" "What is truth?" "What is the world?" For this reason, I believe, philosophy is essential to any education in the arts and sciences, since it provides the best hope for a grasp of the comprehensive meaning of education itself.

PhD 1996, Boston University

Recent Books

The Heresies of Jan Patocka: Phenomenology, History, and Politics. Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Northwestern University Press, March 2023.

Phenomenological Reflections on Violence. A Skeptical Approach. Studies in Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Phenomenology, Architecture, and the Built World. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

Violence and Phenomenology. Studies in Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2009; Paperback, 2014.

Recent Articles

“The Art of Memory: Notes on a Lost Architecture,” in Études phénoménologiques 6 (2022): 97-123.   “A Short Prolegomena to the Philosophy of War, in Four Problems,” in Labyrinth: An International Journal for Philosophy, Value Theory and Sociocultural Hermeneutics 23/2 (2021): 99-116.   ”Patočka and the Metaphysics of Sacrifice,” in: Studies in East European Thought 73/3 (2021): 271-286.   “Mathesis and Lifeworld. Some Remarks on Thomas Seebohm’s History as a Science and the System of Sciences,” in: Thomas Seebohm on the Foundations of the Sciences. Nenon, ed. Cham: Springer, 2020: 97- 112.   “War and Sacrifice. The Troubled Legacy of the First World War,” in: Phenomenologies of Sacrifice. Hagedorn and Sternad, eds. Special issue of Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 6/2 (2018): 99-126.

“O co usilovala asubjektivní fenomenologie“ ["On the Promise of an Asubjective Phenomenology”], trans. Jan Frei, in: Filosocký časopsis 6/65 (2017): 855- 871.

“Polemos in Jan Patočka's Political Thought,” in: Thinking After Europe: JanPatočka and Politics. Tava, ed. London: Rowman and Littlefield. August 2016: 77-94.

"Deep History. Reflections on the Archive and the Lifeworld,” in: Historical Apriori inHusserl and Foucault. Allen and Aldea, eds. Special issue of Continental Philosophy Review49/1 (2016): 29-39.

“Philosophy in Dark Times. An Essay on Jan Patočka’s Philosophy of History,” in: Religion, War, and the Crisis of Modernity. A Special Issue Dedicated to the Philosophy of Jan Patočka . The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy  XIV. Hagedorn and Dodd, eds. London: Routledge, 2015: 64-92. “Clarity, Fiction, and Description,” in: Commentary on Husserl's Ideas I . Andrea Staiti, ed. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015: 159-176. “Aristotle and Phenomenology,” in: Phenomenology in a New Key—Between Analysis and History: Essays in Honor of Richard Cobb-Stevens. Bloechl and de Warren, eds. Dordrecht: Springer, 2015.  

Curriculum Vitae