Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab – The Falls of Europe and Critical European Philosophy

Date: 4 November 2025, 9 am (CET)
Venue: Lecture hall O2, O-building, Paderborn University

We are pleased to announce a lecture by Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, entitled “The Falls of Europe and Critical European Philosophy.”

Much of critical European philosophy has emerged in response to situations of European collapse such as the rise of fascism, World War II, the annihilation of European Jewry, and the Gaza war. To what extent was the non-European a consideration in those efforts of philosophical critical self-reflection? In other words, to what extent was the history of Europe outside Europe part of that self-reflection? My talk examines this question by looking at a few samples of those efforts, namely Adorno’s analysis of the “Authoritarian Personality,” Sartre’s Existentialism and Levinas’s ethical prima philosophia. It compares them with readings of the same epoch and the same phenomena by philosophers from outside Europe, such as Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. Dubois and others. My talk ends with a few remarks on some of the findings of this contrapuntal reading and some reflections on the last episode of Europe’s fall in Gaza.

About Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab:
Dr. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab is Associate Professor and Head of the Philosophy Program at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Dr. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab studied philosophy at the American University of Beirut and the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). She taught in Lebanon at the American University of Beirut and Balamand University and has been a visiting professor at a number of Universities in Europe and the US, including Bonn, Columbia, Yale, and Brown. She has been a Fulbright fellow at the New School University in NYC, a research fellow at the German Orient Institute in Beirut, a visiting research fellow at the Universities of Bieleleld and Erfurt, at the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies of the Free University of Berlin, at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Bonn, and the Marburg research network “Re-Configurations, History, Remembrance and Transformation Processes in the Middle East and North Africa”. She has been a faculty member of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies since October 2016. Her research interests center on Western and post-colonial philosophies of culture, with a particular focus on contemporary Arab thought and philosophy. She has received the 2013 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Abu Dhabi in the category of “Contribution to the Development of Nations” for the Arabic version of her book Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (Columbia University Press, 2010). Her new book is entitled Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution: The Egyptian and Syrian Debates (Columbia University Press, 2019).

Dr. Kassab is also longtime fellow of the Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists. At the IAPh 2021 Defining the Future – Rethinking the Past – Congress in 2021 Kassab has given a keynote and her expertise on Women in Writing the History of Contemporary Arab Philosophy. The whole recording can be found and watched at our YouTube Channel.

More information about the event can be found here.