Professor Joanna Hodge
Professor Emerita
My profile
Biography
In my spare time, I take an interest in Political life, cinema and music, as well as health. My weekends are a patchwork of political talk, trips to the cinema and attempts to up the activity rate by swimming, walking and other forms of exercise.
My research interests include Phenomenology, and the History of Technics, Critical Theory and Transcendental Aesthetics. This last provides an account of the arrival of meaning and order in configurations of space and time. While students of particle physics spend enormous amounts of money seeking to split ever smaller particles, and listen deep underground for the echoes of the Big Bang, the sources of human confusion are to be traced in misunderstandings and miscommunications, and in a certain dislocation of individual time from the collective time of daily events.
I am researching these processes as analysed in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, with a monograph on the way under the title ‘The Return of the Thing: Reading Jean-Luc Nancy’. Jean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher who taught for many years at the University of Strasbourg. Born in 1940, he is still actively reserchng and publishing, and is to be found commenting on current political and international events. He is a good example of a publc intellectual, for whom the privielge and demand of being a University Professor is to take a view and intervene in relation to key questions of the day.
My next grand project is to come to terms with the output of a radical thinker called Michel Serres who supposes that climate change and information technology have totally transformed how we should think about the classical questions of philosophy.
Words of wisdom
The texts to be read are difficult; the ideas conveyed by them not self-evident.
Studying for a philosopy degree is an opportunity to get assistance in grappling with both ideas and texts: not just from your teachers but also from similarly motivated peers. The discussion in class is often the best way to find a way into thinking with and through complex ideas which at first look impenetrable or obscure.
The world is made up of complex shifting forces; the ideas and concepts needed to make sense of them are also complex and at first sight difficult to grasp.
Academic and professional qualifications
- 1983 D. Phil: “Martin Heidegger’s Account of Truth: A study of Sein und Zeit”.
- Examiners Alan Montefiore, Balliol, and Professor John Macquarrie, Christ Church
- Wolfson College, Oxford
- 1982 MA Oxon
- 1979 Matriculated at Karl Ruprecht Universitaet, Heidelberg
- 1975 BA Oxon (Philosophy and Economics), Somerville College, Oxford
Other academic service (administration and management)
HEFCE RAE Panels in Philosophy 2001, 2008
Founder member of the Society for European Philosophy UK (1997); Second President, 2000-2004
Founder member of Editorial Board, Derrida Today Edinburgh University Press (2008)
Editor of New Book Series for Bloomsbury Publishers (2016): Michel Serres and the reinvention of philosophy
Professional Promotions Processes internal and external
Peer review for publishers’ ms. and journal articles
Extensive examining for PHD/D.Phil/M.Litt. UK, Canada, Australia
External Examuer undergraduate programs (fourth, fifth, sixth level Dublin City University 2017-2021
Membership of Arts and Humanities Faculty Committees: FRDC, Faculty Ethics Committee etc.
PHD management in Philosophy, gaining AHRC recogntion for the provison at MMU in 2004
MMU delegate on the AHRC NorthWestPathwayDoctoralTrainingProgramme
Languages
English, German, French
Membership of professional associations
Member of the Husserl Circle, Society for Women in Philosophy, Hegel Society of Great Britain, British Society for Phenomenology, Society for European Philosophy, Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Editorial Boards of Aesthetic pathways (APW); Derrida Today; Angelaki: Journal for Theoretical Humanities and the Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology
Member of Common Room, Wolfson College, Association of Senior Members, Somerville College, Oxford
Teaching
Why do I teach?
Teaching is a way of testing the adequacy of current formulations of problems, and of current and historical responses to them. Presenting philosophy to students is always invigorating since they have their own distinctive take on issues and their own requirements for making sense of their own lives and understanding of philosophy. If research work can not be made accessible to students it is not obvious what its point might be.
How I’ll teach you
I will attempt to put you in a position so you can read the texts and think about the issues for yourself; and then make up your mind what you think of them: whether they help you develop your own understanding and give you a sense of what it takes to do philosophy.
There is also the need to ask how the texts in the history of philosophy sometimes continue and sometimes fail to ddress our issues of today.
It is important to ask in what ways philosophy is still the same as in the time of Plato and Aristotle, and in what ways it has changed ? The inclusion of women in the discussion and writing of philosophical texts to be studied is one major change to be thought about, and the imbalance betweennumbers of texts by men and texts by women as philosophy is taught needs discussion.
Why study…
Philosophy at MMU is unusual in paying strict attention to differences between French and German, English and American trajectories of philosophy in the last century. I was trained in the latter, but did my postgraduate research in the former. MMU gives me the opportunity to continue to work in the gap between. The former is attuned to general questions of cultural transmission and historical specificity; the latter focuses on detailed analysis and questions of pressing moral concern. Students today, in a world in transition, gain much from putting detail and moral urgency back into a wider conceptual, historical context.
Three Words to Sum Up the Course: Context, Detail, Independent Reading.
In the very first sentence or phrase of any piece of language use, there arrive precedents and models. To understand a text message requires practice and familiarity;. In the same way, your teachers seek to give you enough of the required context to appreciate the detail of what is under discussion, and to provide you with the possibility of making progress through independent reading.
Postgraduate teaching
MA Course: Ethics and Phenomenology: Derrida and Nancy
Subject areas
Philosophy
Supervision
PHD supervision: phenomenology and aesthetics: the post-Kantian tradtion: Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, Benjamin, Derrida, and Nancy, feminist philosophical critique.
Research outputs
- Renewing phenomenology
- Derrida on time
- Transcendental Philosophy and Aesthetics: Nancy, Benjamin, Hegel, Kant
- Genealogies of Future Differences (Feminist philosophical Critique)
- Rethinking Transcendental Aesthetics