Hossein Mesbahian

Hossein Mesbahian is a faculty member of the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Literature and Humanities at the University of Tehran. He completed his undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of Tehran, then took his master's and doctoral degrees in philosophy (education) at the University of Toronto in Canada. He later completed a postdoctoral period at the same university. At the University of Tehran he has taught courses such as the history of nineteenth-century philosophy, contemporary French philosophy, hermeneutics, phenomenology and the philosophies of existence, political philosophy, philosophy of culture and society, and philosophy of life.

His research first centered on a non-Western interpretation of two fundamental problems of modern Western philosophy, subjectivity and universality, understood as the two main pillars of modernity. The results appeared in the book "Modernity and Its Other: A Critical Encounter with Habermas's Interpretation of Modernity as an Unfinished Project" (Agah Publications) and in articles such as "The Human of Aspirations and God as Beyond Being" and "Tracing the Emancipatory Theme of Subjectivity from Frankfurt to Paris." In another article, drawing on the thought of Paul Ricoeur, he dealt with a genetic phenomenology of ideology.

His other works include the book "Moral Politics: On the Relation between Politics and Ethics" (Agah Publications, 2022). He also published a translation of "From Ancient Hermeneutics to Emancipatory Politics" by Dieter Misgeld, and with Misgeld and Trevor Norris he co-authored a book and an article on Misgeld's philosophical journey from hermeneutics to emancipatory politics. In further articles he has written on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and the relation between ethics and politics, and on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. He has also written on Ali Shariati and on the question of Iranian identity in a globalized world.

In recent years the focus of his research has been the philosophy of the university. The result is a two-volume book titled "The Philosophy of the University," which is forthcoming. Part of the book is devoted to the four historical stages of the university as an institution (Paris, Halle, Berlin and Phoenix), and its other parts to the idea of the university in the work of philosophers such as Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset, Jaspers, Gadamer, Derrida and Foucault, and of thinkers such as Newman, Humboldt, Weber and Bourdieu. Articles such as "On the Conditions of the Possibility of Teaching Philosophy at the University," "On the Conditions of the Possibility of Engaging in the Humanities," and "The University from History to Philosophy: On the Necessity of a Historical Analysis of the Institution and a Philosophical Rethinking of the Idea of the University" are products of this project.