Michael Weinman

Michael Weinman is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College Berlin since 2013, after originally arriving as a Guest Professor in 2010. He is the author or editor of five books, most recently, Plato and the Moving Image (Brill, 2019), co-edited with Shai Biderman of Tel Aviv University. In 2018, he published The Parthenon and Liberal Education in the SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy from SUNY Press, an investigation of the Parthenon as an education in the liberal arts co-authored with Bard College Berlin faculty member Geoff Lehman. His earlier books address the role of pleasure in Aristotle's ethical thought and the relevance of Virginia Woolf's experimentation with narrative for debates about subjectivity in continental philosophy, respectively.

Michael also has published articles and book chapters on Ancient Greek science, especially mathematics, and its reception in 20th-century German philosophy and on themes in contemporary political philosophy. His current recent interests focus on Arendt’s heterodox understanding of power and political violence for contemporary debates about populism and the challenges facing the liberal international order today and on the changing perception of the entwinement of mind and world in nature writing and narrative fiction from Goethe through Woolf.

Classes Taught at Bard College Berlin:
Core Courses:
Early Modern Science
Forms of Love
Origins of Political Economy
Plato's Republic and Its Interlocutors
Property

Foundational and Advanced Modules:
Freedom of Expression
Nationalism
Constitutions, Ancient and Modern
Truth in Action: Ethics and Practical Reason
The Calculus and the "Mathematization of Nature"
Aristotle's (so-called) Organon
Character in Aristotle's Poetics, Politics, and Rhetoric
Michel de Montaigne: Essays
The Violence in and of Political Life

General Teaching Interests:
Ancient Greek philosophy; Ethics and political philosophy; Philosophy and literature; 20th century Continental philosophy

Publications:

Books, authored or edited

• Vormann, B. and M. Weinman, eds. 2020. Illiberalism: Understanding a Global Phenomenon. New York and London: Routledge.
• Biderman, S. and Weinman, M, eds. 2019. Plato and the Moving Image, Leiden: Brill.
• Lehman, G. and Weinman, M. 2018. The Parthenon and Liberal Education. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• Weinman, M. 2012. Language, Time and Identity in Woolf’s The Waves: The Subject in Empire’s Shadow. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Weinman, M. 2007. Pleasure in Aristotle’s Ethics. London: Continuum Books.

Peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters

• Weinman, M. 2020. “Arendt and the Legitimate Leadership of Plural Persons: Hierarchy and the Limits of Horizontal Power Relations.” In: Maria Robaszkiewicz and Tobias Matzner, eds. Hannah Arendt: Challenges of Plurality, Dordrecht: Springer.
• M. Weinman and B. Vormann. 2020. “From a Politics of No Alternative to a Politics of Fear: Illiberalism and Its Variants.” In Boris Vormann and Michael Weinman, eds. Illiberalism: Understanding a Global Phenomenon. New York and London: Routledge.
• M. Weinman and B. Vormann. 2020. “The Good City in an Era of Planetary Urbanization.” In Gregor Fitzi, Jürgen Mackert und Brian S. Turner, eds. Successful Cities - Crises of Citizenship. New York and London: Routledge.
• Weinman, M. 2020. “What, if any, mathematics might Thales or his contemporaries have learned from ‘the East’?” In: Hahn, Robert and Alex Herda, eds. Knowledge in Archaic Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Weinman, M. 2019. “Arendt and the return of ethnonationalism.” In Demos vs. Polis: The New Populism Liberal Herald, Vol. 4.
• Weinman, M. 2019. “The Myth of Er as Rationalizing Recording Device.” In Plato and the Moving Image, eds. Shai Biderman and Michael Weinman. Leiden: Brill, pp. 100-120.
• Weinman, M. 2019. “Epic.” In Palgrave Handbook on Philosophy and Literature, eds. Michael Mack and Barry Stocker. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 185-202.
• Reed, I. and Weinman, M. 2018. “Agency, Power, Modernity: A Manifesto for Social Theory.” European Journal for Cultural and Political Sociology (DOI: 10.1080/23254823.2018.1499434)
• Weinman, M. 2018. Arendt and the Legitimate Expectation for Hospitality and Membership Today. Moral Philosophy and Politics (5:1), pp. 127-50. (DOI: 10.1515/mopp-2016-0043)
• Weinman, M. 2018. “Misrepresentation, misrecognition and statue politics.” In: #Charlottesville: Before and Beyond. New York: Public Seminar Books.
• Lehman, G. and Weinman, M. 2018. “Recursive knowledge procedures informing the design of the Parthenon.” In Revolutions and Continuity in Ancient Greek Mathematics, ed. Michalis Sialaros. Berlin: De Gruyter; pp. 235-70.
• Weinman, M. 2017. Stanley Rosen’s Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger: On the occasion of Platonic Production (Andy German, ed., 2014). Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (38:1).
• Weinman, M. 2016. “Phronēsis after the post-metaphysical age: Aristotle and practical philosophy today.” In Thinking the Plural: Richard J. Bernstein’s Contributions to American Philosophy, eds. Marcia Morgan and Megan Craig. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield; pp. 3-20.
• Weinman, M. 2016. “Living Well and the Promise of Cosmopolitan Identity: Aristotle’s ergon and Contemporary Civic Republicanism.” In Civic Republicanism: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, eds. Geoffrey C. Kellow and Neven Leddy. Toronto: University Toronto; pp. 59-71.
• Weinman, M. 2015. Doing the impossible: The trace of the other between eulogy and deconstruction: Rereading Derrida’s Work of Mourning. Philosophical Papers (44:2); 261-76. (DOI: 10.1080/05568641.2015.1056958)
• Weinman, M. 2014. Metaphysics, Lam and the echo of Homer: First philosophy as a way of life. Philosophical Papers (43:1); 67-88. (DOI: 10.1080/05568641.2014.901695)
• Weinman, M. 2013. “Education: The ethical-political energeia.” Bloomsbury Companion to Aristotle. London: Bloomsbury Books; pp. 263-76.
• Weinman, M. 2011. Living well and sexual self-determination: Expanding human rights discourse about sex and sexuality. Law, Culture, and the Humanities 7:1; 101-20.
• Weinman, M. 2009. Making ‘men see clearly’: Physical imperfection and mathematical order in Ptolemy’s Syntaxis. In: Ann Ward, ed. Matter and Form: From Natural Science to Political Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books; 57-70.
• Weinman, M. 2006. State Speech vs. Hate Speech? What to Do about Words that Wound. Essays in Philosophy (7:1).
• Weinman, M. 2001. Cultural Engendering and Points of Resistance: Foucault, Butler, and Sexual Subjectivities.  International Studies in Philosophy (33:1; 123-143).

Book reviews

• Weinman, M. 2018. Winslow, R. Organism and Environment: Inheritance and Subjectivity in the Life Sciences (Lexington, 2017). Review of Metaphysics 72(1).
• Weinman, M. 2016. Cairns, D. (Lester Embree, ed.), The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl (Springer 2013), for Phenomenological Reviews.
• Weinman, M. 2014. Horky, P. S., Plato and Pythagoreanism (Oxford 2013). Archai (13); 165-169.

Other publications
Contributing Editor, Publicseminar.org, 2015 - Present. Details here.

Contact
Prof. Dr. Michael Weinman
Philosophy
Phone: +49 30 43733 222
Email: m.weinman[at]berlin.bard.edu