Arnold Davidson
University of Chicago and Hebrew University
Department: Philosophy
Bio: Arnold I. Davidson is currently Distinguished Professor of Humanities at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He teaches in several departments, principally in the Department of Jewish Thought and the Department of Romance Studies.
He is also the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, the Divinity School, and the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. He has served as European Editor of Critical Inquiry, and he has also been a director of the France-Chicago Center. His major fields of research and teaching are the philosophy of Judaism, the history of contemporary European philosophy, the history of moral and political philosophy, the history of the human sciences, the history and philosophy of religion, and literature as a form of philosophical expression.
Selected Publications:
Gli esercizi spirituali della musica. Improvvisazione e creazione. Mimesis Edizioni, 2020.
Series editor of the English translation of the courses of Michel Foucault at the Collège de France. Palgrave Macmillan, UK/USA. (This series will result in thirteen volumes.)
Co-author of Reflexões sobre o nacional-socialismo. Editora Âyiné, 2017.
Editor of Pierre Hadot, Studi di filosofia antica. Edizioni ETS, 2014.
Religión, razón y espiritualidad. Ediciones Alpha Decay, Barcelona, 2014.
Editor of Primo Levi, Vivir para contar. Escribir tras Auschwitz. Ediciones Alpha Decay, Barcelona, 2010.
Editor of La vacanza morale del fascismo. Intorno a Primo Levi. Edizioni ETS, 2009.
Co-editor of Michel Foucault. Philosophie. Gallimard, 2004 (an anthology of the writings of Michel Foucault).
The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. Harvard University Press, 2001. (Translation into Portugese, Italian, Spanish and French with a new preface).
Editor of Pierre Hadot. Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique.Albin Michel, 2002. (Translation into approximately ten languages, with a new preface in the Italian Edition.)
Editor of Foucault and His Interlocutors. The University of Chicago Press, 1997.
La philosophie comme manière de vivre (Co-authored with Pierre Hadot and Jeannie Carlier). Albin Michel, 2001. (Translated into approximately ten languages) - English translation: The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannier Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson (translated by Marc Djaballah), Stanford University Press, 2009.
Editor of Pierre Hadot. Philosophy As a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Basil Blackwell Press, 1995.
“Spiritual Exercises, Improvisation, and Moral Perfectionism: With Special Reference to Sonny Rollins,” in Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. Edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut. Oxford University Press, 2016.