8/6/2020: Béatrice Han-Pile on Two Puzzles in the Early Christian Constitution of the Self: Reflections on Foucault’s Interpretation of John Cassian

Béatrice Han-Pile studied philosophy, history and literature at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and was awarded a Fellowship from the Thiers Foundation while completing her doctoral thesis on Michel Foucault. Before coming to Essex, she taught in France at the Universities of Paris IV-Sorbonne, Reims and Amiens. She is the author of Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Stanford University Press, 2002). She has published mostly on Foucault, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, phenomenology (in particular Heidegger) and the philosophy of agency. In 2015-2018 she was Principal Investigator on a three-year AHRC-funded project on ‘The Ethics of Powerlessness: The Theological Virtues Today’ (EoP). She is currently working on medio-passive agency, both in itself and through the writings of early Christian thinkers (John Cassian and St Augustine) and of more recent authors such as Nietzsche, Foucault and Heidegger. She is also working on hope as a (medio-passive) virtue of powerlessness and on the conditions under which this theological virtue might afford us with appropriate ethical guidance in secular contexts.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Han-Pile's talk - 'Two Puzzles in the Early Christian Constitution of the Self: Reflections on Foucault’s Interpretation of John Cassian' - at the Aristotelian Society on 8 June 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.