Philosophy Department Welcomes Gadamer Visiting Professor

The Philosophy Department is pleased to welcome Professor Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback as the Hans-Georg Gadamer Visiting Professor for spring 2019.  German Idealism, Hermeneutical Phenomenology, Ancient Philosophy, Contemporary French Philosophy and Existentialism, with special interest in the relationship between philosophy, poetry, arts, and politics are her main fields of research.  A native of Brazil, in 1999 Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback moved to Sweden to start, together with Hans Ruin, the Philosophy Department at Södertörn University, where she currently teaches.  In 2013 she was awarded the Karin Gierows Prize by the Swedish Academy.  Recent work has focused on the philosophy of exile, more specifically on the concept of temporality from within the experience of exile and on the role of memory and oblivion in contemporary political thought.   As holder of the Gadamer Chair, Prof. Schuback teaches two courses, Value, Price and Dignity in the Age of the Spectacle, and The Aesthetics of Descartes.  On March 20, she will present a public lecture.  The Gadamer Professorship is held by a scholar with expertise in areas of research in which Gadamer himself was active, such as hermeneutics, phenomenology, German Idealism, Greek philosophy, philosophy of culture, aesthetics, and Continental philosophy of language.

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback was born in Brazil and studied philosophy at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).  In addition to her studies in Philosophy, she also studied Architecture, and in 1981 received her degree with majors in both fields.  In 1982–1983 she studied at Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg-in-Breisgau, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Ute Guzzoni.  After returning to Brazil, she developed her studies on the work of Martin Heidegger under the supervision of Prof. Carneiro Leão; this provided her with the background for her translation into Portuguese of Heidegger’s major work Being and Time, published 1989 and in a revised edition in 2006.  Between 1985 and 1992, she worked as coordinator for the cultural section of the Forum for Science and Culture of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and also as the main editor of the Journal on Philosophy and Aesthetics, Arte e Palavra.

Studies on Heidegger showed the necessity of investigating the Romantic and Idealistic basis of the new existential-phenomenological concept of temporality that he proposed. The most challenging philosophical question for her became the re-conceptualizing of metaphysical notions of change, transformation, and beginning. Central to her work was the investigation of new categories needed to grasp these notions beyond traditional dialectics with its understanding in terms of the logic of oppositions.  Searching for a critical perspective from within Idealism itself, she found an important inspiration in the work of F. W. J. Schelling.  Both his critique of dialectics and the Idealistic concepts of time with focus on the concept of beginning and becoming in his late philosophy became the main subject of her doctoral thesis, defended in 1992, under the title "The Beginning of God: On the Concept of Beginning in Schelling’s Late Philosophy" (published as a monograph in 1998).  In 1994 she became Associate Professor at the Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (IFCS/UFRJ), where she taught until 1999, when she moved to Södertörn University in Sweden.  In 2011 she was promoted to the position of Full Professor.