Susan Neiman
The FACTS list does not name a single work by Susan Neiman, so the structural recipe cannot open with a cited title. The biography below opens instead with the most concrete professional fact available and follows the recipe as closely as the evidence allows.
Neiman is a philosopher, historian, non-fiction writer, journalist, and university teacher who works in both English and German. Born on March 27, 1955, in Atlanta, she went on to study at Harvard University and Freie Universität Berlin, a dual education that spans the American and German academic worlds. She holds citizenship in the United States, Israel, and Germany, a cross-national life that corresponds to her working across two languages and two intellectual traditions.
Her work has been recognized through several awards. She received the Margherita von Brentano Prize, the International Spinoza Prize, the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book, and the August Bebel Prize. These honors come from different institutions and cover philosophy, political writing, and public intellectual engagement, reflecting the range of her output as a writer and thinker.
The Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book is among those recognitions that situate her writing explicitly within political discourse, and the August Bebel Prize similarly marks engagement with political and social questions. For a philosopher and writer whose biographical coordinates run from Atlanta through Harvard and Freie Universität Berlin, and whose citizenship extends across three countries, these prizes represent a concrete record of how her work has been received across national and disciplinary lines.
Quotes by Susan Neiman
A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.
Negotiating small differences is part of being a grownup; no one can tell you in advance where to put your foot down.
What the Enlightenment rejected in the South Sea islands was what it perceived as a stupor, the docile submission to whatever bit of the given is coming your way. And what’s coming your way is unlikely to be a breeze or a cow or a coconut, but a new kind of screen you can zap or click to create the illusion that life isn’t passing you by.
Tribalism will always make your world smaller; universalism is the only way to expand it.
Home is the normal – whatever place you happen to start from and return to without having to answer questions. It’s a metaphor that may seem to fit reduced expectations. We no longer seek towers that would reach to the heavens; we’ve abandoned attempts to prove that we live in a chain of being whose every link bears witness to the glory of God. We merely seek assurance that we find ourselves in a place where we know our way about.
Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.
The dangers of sophistry and scholasticism are present in the possibility of philosophy itself.