The Center Welcomes New Associate Director
A warm welcome to Aminah Hasan-Birdwell, Ph.D., our new Associate Director of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy!
Aminah (Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University) is currently the Alva and Beatrice Bradley Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Furman University. Committed to the revision of the history of philosophy, Professor Hasan-Birdwell’s specialties are early modern philosophy, early twentieth-century philosophy (emphasis on phenomenology), critical philosophy of race, and history of political thought. Her interests include ethics, Kant’s philosophy as it relates to the philosophy of race and German idealism), and Jewish philosophy.
Professor Hasan-Birdwell intends to expand and deepen her work on early modern women as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University and as the Associate Director of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy. She will apply her longstanding concern with the relationship between ontology and ethics to the thought of Margaret Cavendish, Elisabeth of Bohemia, and Anne Conway, and hopes to address a gap in current scholarship by focusing on the problem of war in early modern women’s philosophies. Her main questions include: How did early modern women philosophers conceptualize the problem of war and violence through their own theoretical and practical philosophies; how can these contributions change the history of philosophy, ethics, and political thought; and how does the treatment of these thinkers within the framework of the New Narratives project change the landscape of contemporary scholarship in the history of philosophy and provide evidence to reassess the grounds of its critique in twenty-first-century philosophy?
Professor Hasan-Birdwell Aminah is currently writing an article on Elisabeth of Bohemia’s reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince in her correspondence with Descartes, which will be part of a book on war and suffering in the thought of Margaret Cavendish, Elisabeth of Bohemia, and Anne Conway.