Lecture at Princeton University: “Lebanon: The Imbalance of Terror”
Jens Hanssen left Beirut on 2 October, a few hours before the first Israeli rocket hit near the Orient-Institut in central Beirut. At Princeton, he will offer his experience and analysis of how and why Lebanon came under attack following 16 September.
Date, time and place: Monday, 21 October 2024, 12 pm, Chancellor Green 105. Princeton University 
 

Lecture at the University of Toronto: "Husayn Muruwwah and Ernst Bloch encounter Ibn Sina: On Marxist discoveries of Arab-Islamic philosophy circa 1952"
This talk is part of a chapter in Professor Jens Hanssen’s ongoing research on Arabic-German intellectual entanglement in the 20th century. It is about two philosophers, one German, one Lebanese, who were inspired by the Iranian Tudeh party’s millennial commemoration of Ibn Sina’s life and work in 1952 in Hamadan. Both independently invoked a materialist tradition of philosophy that they claimed had been buried under civilizational accounts of cultural heritage in Europe and the Muslim World. Professor Hanssen will juxtapose Ernst Bloch’s matter/form discussion in his essay Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left and Husayn Muruwwah’s al-Thaqafa al-Wataniyya article “Ibn Sina: fikra taqaddumiyya” both of 1952. He asks: What were modern Arab intellectuals’ stakes in Abbasi-Andalusian and continental philosophy in the 20thcentury? He offers some thoughts on Husayn Muruwwah’s 1979 masterpiece Materialist Trends in Arab-Islamic Philosophy. Finally, He considers how this subversive materialist tradition might challenge the civilizationalist discourses curated by Jürgen Habermas and Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri.
Date, time and place: Thursday, 24 October 2024,  3pm – 5pm, 200B (4 Bancroft Avenue, Toronto)