The falls of Europe and Critical European Philosophy

Talk by Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

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.