Hasana Sharp
Chair & Associate Professor
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Hasana Sharp earned her PhD from the Pennsylvania State University (2005) and a diplôme (pensionnaire scientifique étranger) from the Ecole Normale Supérieure des Lettres et Sciences Humaines (2004). Her research is in the history of political philosophy with a focus on Spinoza. Her 2011 book examines the implications of Spinoza's denial of human exceptionalism for ethics and politics, with consideration of arguments in feminist thought and critical race theory. She is currently undertaking a SSHRC-funded research project on Spinoza and Servitude. She interested in how his analyses of human servitude, bondage, and slavery, central to both his ethics and politics, can be understood in relationship to other models. In particular, how do Spinoza's philosophical and political conceptions of servitude interact with the notions of his contemporaries objecting to the enslavement of African and Indigenous peoples or to the domination of women?
History of Political Philosophy (esp. 17th and 19th centuries); 17th century philosophy; Contemporary Political Philosophy; Feminist Philosophy; Philosophy of Race.
Books:
Spinoza's Political Treatise: A Critical Guide, co-edited with Y. Melamed (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Feminist Philosophies of Life, co-edited with Chloë Taylor (McGill-Queens University Press, 2016).
Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (University of Chicago, 2011).
Recent Essays:
“Spinoza on the Fear of Solitude,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 11 (forthcoming 2021).
“Not all Humans: Radical Criticism of the Anthropocene Narrative,” Environmental Philosophy 17.1 (2020): 143-158.
“Feminism and Heterodoxy: Moira Gatens’s Spinoza,” Philosophy Today 63.3 (2019): 795-803.
“Spinoza’s commonwealth and the anthropomorphic illusion,” Philosophy Today (Fall 2017): 833-846.
“Spinoza and the possibilities for radical climate ethics,” Dialogues in Human Geography 7.2 (July 2017): 156-160.
“Generosity as Freedom in Spinoza’s Ethics,” in Spinoza in 21st Century American and French Philosophy, edited by J. Stetter and C. Ramond. Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 277-288.
“Family Quarrels and Mental Harmony: Spinoza’s Oikos-Polis Analogy,” in Spinoza’s Political Treatise: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2018): 93-110.