Hans Ruin

Biography

B. 1961. Professor, Philosophy, Södertörn University. PhD in theoretical philosophy from Stockholm University in 1994 with dissertation Enigmatic Origins: Tracing the Theme of Historicity Through Heidegger’s Works. Has published extensively in the field of phenomenology and hermeneutic theory. Co-founder and board member of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology. Co-editor for Nietzsche´s Collected Works in Swedish. Member of the Board of Sats and Jahrbuch für Hermeneutische Philosophie. Co-Editor for Södertörn Philosophical Studies. In 2000-03 directed research project The Utopia of Tradition, and edited with M. Schuback The Past´s Presence: Essays on the Historicity of Philosophical Thought (2006). Hans Ruin is member of the program committee and currently Director for the Program.

Contact: hans.ruin@sh.se

Ongoing research

Hans Ruin will contribute a study devoted to the philosophical and psychological foundations for historical consciousness, in the existential predicament of relating to the dead. In his theory of human historicity, Heidegger (1927) indicated that the historical as such (the historical artefact or event) is essentially connected to a shared world no longer there, to those “once-having-been”, in other words to the dead. This opens the question of history as a way of being-with-the-dead, a category that Heidegger never really elaborates. Already the great French historian Jules Michelet spoke of historiography as a desire to ”speak with the dead” and also to ”calm the dead who still haunt the present”. The idea is to elucidate from a philosophical-anthropological and psychoanalytical perspective what it means to live with the dead, as a life both present and absent, in other words with the spectral or ghostly. Jacques Derrida (1993) has introduced the question of the spectral as a relevant category for thinking history. History is the space where the dead live on, where the rise and emerge, and haunt the living. It implies mourning, nostalgia, repression and its return, the uncanny. In a series of papers Ruin will develop his earlier work on the theory of historicity and historical existence (1994), combining existential-phenomenological and psychoanalytical methods (Freud, Klein, and Abraham/Torok).

Selected bibliography

”Ein geheimnisvolles Schicksal – Heidegger und das griechische Erbe”, Martin Heidegger Gesellschaft Schriftenreihe Bd 8 (2007).

– The Past´s Presence. Essays on the Historicity of Philosophical Thought, with M. Sá Cavalcante, Södertörn Philosophical Studies vol 3 (2006)

– ”Contributions”, Blackwell Companion to Heidegger, eds. Dreyfus & Wrathall (Blackwell: Oxford, 2005).

– ”Einheit in der Differenz - Differenz in der Einheit. Heraklit und die Wahrheit der Hermeneutik”, Hermeneutische Wege. Hans-Georg Gadamer zum Hundertsten, eds. G Figal et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000).

– Enigmatic Origins. Tracing the theme of historicity through Heidegger’s works (Avh.), Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm Studies in Philosophy 15 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1994).