Who are the Upper West Side Philosophers?
Kathrin Stengel, Ph. D., studied philosophy at the Universities of Leuven (Belgium), Munich, and Konstanz (Germany). She has taught philosophy at Seattle University and published essays on ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology, as well as a comparative study on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception, entitled Das Subjekt als Grenze (The Subject as Threshold), and November Rose: A Speech on Death (winner of the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award). A frequent guest on radio programs throughout the US and Europe, Kathrin Stengel has organized international philosophical events, including ‘What is Space? A Philosophical Inquiry into Space and the Imagination’ and ‘About Style: A Philosophical Meditation on the Question of Style’ (both at the Rhode Island School of Design), ‘Thinking and Experiencing Space’ (Germany), ‘Philosophical Walks with Nietzsche’ (Switzerland), ‘Pain and Beauty in Philosophy and the Arts’ (Seattle), and ‘Image and Music: Improvisations on the 14 Stations’ for the Interfaith Assembly for Homelessness and Housing in New York City, video documentation of which was on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2005. For many years, Kathrin has also taught Vipassana Meditation. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and three sons.
“I fell in love with philosophy
during my last two years in High School, when I was first exposed to the works of Camus, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Until then, I simply did not know that there was a discipline out there – philosophy – dealing precisely with those questions that I couldn’t stop thinking about: What is thinking? What does it mean to believe something? What does it mean to be a ‘human’ being? How does language work? How can we understand each other? What do I perceive? What is good? Even though my university training did not prepare me to test philosophy in everyday life, I felt that, as a philosopher, it is my duty and my job to do so. When I became a mother I added Vipassana meditation to my philosophical practice, approaching it with skepticism at first and enjoying it with enthusiasm later. Overcoming my intellectual fear of exploring the mind from a bodily perspective profoundly enriched my philosophical thinking: I realized that much of what the practice of philosophy involves can be called ‘intellectual meditation’, while meditation can be viewed as ‘embodied philosophy’. Working as a professor of philosophy I yet again realized that despite the fact that philosophy has so much to offer to everybody it is scarcely practiced outside the university. This led to the founding of the Independent Center for Philosophical Thinking, an independent space and place for the practice of philosophy in a way that is rigorous, yet embodied, disciplined, yet relaxed, historically founded, yet geared toward everyday life.”
Kathrin Stengel
Michael Eskin, Ph.D., cofounder of the Independent Center for Philosophical Thinking, was educated in the United States, France, and Germany, and has taught at Rutgers University, Columbia University, and the University of Cambridge in England, where he was also a Fellow at Sidney Sussex College. Having published widely on philosophical, ethical, and literary subjects, Michael Eskin is the author of Nabokov’s Version of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: Between Version and Fiction; Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan; and Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky. He has also published a book of aphorisms, Philosophical Fragments of a Contemporary Life, under the pseudonym Julien David. He lives in New York with his wife and their three children and lectures regularly across the United States and Europe on subjects as diverse as poetry, philosophy, and cultural prejudice (most recently as a guest of the United States Consul General in Germany).
“Philosophy and poetry have been my two ruling intellectual passions. I fell in love
with poetry when I first translated, in my early teens, the twentieth-century Russian poet, Sergej Jesenin; I consciously embarked on the journey of philosophical thinking when, as an adolescent, I began trying to make sense of the emotional and logical motivations underlying my own and my family members’ actions and decisions through the prism of my readings of the works of Sartre, Camus, and others. Much later – first, as a student of literature and philosophy and, subsequently, as a university professor – was I to understand why, at the end of the day, you may not be able to engage in one without engaging in the other: both philosophy and poetry are like the two sides of a coin – the coin being our continual attempt to make sense of and shape our lives. My twofold passion has bestowed intellectual direction and beauty on my life and given me strength to think and act with hope and clarity in moments of crisis. It is this passion, as well as a deep desire to embody and share it with others outside the established educational and institutional frameworks which inspired me to cofound the ICPT, with a view to creating a congenial and nourishing space and place for the pursuit of what Socrates poetically conceived of as the cultivation and perfection of your soul.”
Michael Eskin
