PROF. DR. GABRIEL MOTZKIN (Jerusalem)

The Emotional Preconditions for Modern Subjectivity

Alongside the conceptual and philosophical history of ideas there is another history that is less well documented: the history of feelings. These histories are connected: people often try to feel they way they think is proper, and their choices about how to think are often affected by what they feel. Modern subjectivity is a unique cultural creation; it required emotional building-blocks as well as conceptual articulation and justification. We shall look at the poetry of the troubadours as well as at mystical literature from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in order to excavate some of the antecedents of modern subjectivity.

Gabriel Motzkin is Ahad Ha'am Chair Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has also served as the Executive Director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Most recently he has been a Visiting Scholar at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and the Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. His publications have focused on the development of Heidegger's philosophy, the theory of secularization, memory and history, and on the development of subjectivity.