April 20

Katharina Kraus (U Notre Dame)

Salomé and Spinoza on Unity, Difference and Harmony

Abstract: In the talk, I will offer an analysis of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s philosophy of life and its relation to Spinozistic thought. Life, according to Salomé, is understood in a holistic way as a totality and universal connectedness of reality that precedes all concrete experience. In contrast to alternative biologistic tendencies in philosophy of life, Salomé construes life in its highest form as a distinctively mental-creative process. The immediate lived experience (Erleben) first enables the participation in the whole of life and is therefore the most authentic life-form for an individual. Through co-living (Mitleben), we feel the omnipresent interconnectedness with others and ultimately strive to harmonize the apparent contradictions in life and to embed ourselves in the wholeness and oneness of being (All-Verbundenheit, Einssein-aller).

Katharina Kraus is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (UK) and holds a Master degree in physics from the University of Heidelberg (Germany). She has previously taught at the University of Freiburg (Germany), and she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel).

Her research is primarily concerned with the history of modern philosophy, focusing especially on Immanuel Kant as well as on other thinkers of the European Enlightenment (e.g., John Locke and Gottfried W. Leibniz). More recently, she has begun to explore selected post-Kantian traditions of thought from the 19th and 20th centuries, especially Dilthey’s philosophy of life, Gadamer’s hermeneutics, and the phenomenology of Edith Stein.

A recording of the session will be made available for some time following the event.

(The “Downloads” page is password-protected, and the password is available to all members of the Spinoza and EMP Workshop email list.)

The Workshop thanks The Johns Hopkins Philological Society for its sponsorship of this co-organized event.