Introducing: Jeffrey Hanson, Associate Professor, Philosophy

Jeffrey Hanson is starting out this semester at New College after many years of teaching and researching philosophy in Boston and Australia. He got interested in philosophy when he read Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling at age 17. He wrote about Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger for his undergraduate thesis at the University of Dallas and then about Kierkegaard and Jacques Derrida for his dissertation at Fordham University in the Bronx. He still works primarily on Kierkegaard and 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy, especially philosophy of religion. 

 

His first full-time position was at Boston College, where he taught upper-level courses on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger and started publishing his first books and articles. His first book was an edited collection of essays called Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment. His second was the first edited collection of essays in English on the French phenomenologist Michel Henry, which he co-edited with a colleague; since then he has co-edited another book about Michel Henry and another on Kierkegaardian phenomenology. 

 

After five years at Boston College he took a position at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. There he continued to teach and write and soak up the joys of living in one of the world’s great cities. He wrote a book on Fear and Trembling—it only took 20 years for him to come up with something to say about the text that started it all.

 

For the past eight years he has been Senior Philosopher at Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program. Founded in 2016, the Program is dedicated to the improved understanding and promotion of human flourishing and integrating findings on this important subject from the humanities and the social sciences. He was one of the first people hired into the Program at its inception and over the years has expanded his training in philosophy to start publishing theoretical work in psychology journals. While at the Program he co-edited two more volumes of essays for the Cambridge Critical Guide series on Kierkegaard’s books The Sickness unto Death and Works of Love. He also wrote a book on the history of the philosophy of work. 

 

Right now he is co-writing a book about Kierkegaard’s moral psychology, which investigates his favorite philosopher’s theories of anxiety, despair, affectivity, and love.