Dr. Jonathan Soen

Dr. Jonathan Soen

Postdoctoral UP Fellow

Period at the center: October 2022 - October 2023

Research Project: The Life of Thinking

Email: johnath3@post.tau.ac.il

Jonathan Soen received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Tel Aviv in 2019 with a dissertation on the concept of truth. He has formerly been a Minerva Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leipzig. His research is focused on questions that concern the nature of thinking. Figures of special interest include Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin. In addition to his work in philosophy, he has published books in poetry and essay.   

Research Project

The Life of Thinking

Aristotle taught that thinking and living constitute activities of a mutual form. Activities that exhibit this form are ones in which both the subject and the end of the activity are fully internal to the activity itself. In contrast to activities whose subject is an agent or patient, activities of the first type are neither something that a subject does nor something that it undergoes; rather, they spell out facets of what their subject is; its activity of being what it is. Modern philosophy has rendered this notion of activity all but unintelligible.  Specifically, by working within an inherently transactional conception of human cognition which treats of cognitive acts as instances of the general schema S Φ p, modern epistemology maintains a radical separation between study of thinking and the study of human life, i.e. the human form of being. My project seeks to restablish their unity by offerring both a critique of the modern tradition and a radical reaassement of some of its key moments, with a particular focus on Kant and the post-Kantian tradition.