Professor Emeritus of Philosophy

Philosophy

Jonathan Lee began his career working in ancient Greek philosophy but finds himself now focused largely in contemporary French philosophy. His current research interests lie at the intersection of recent French philosophy, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics, and he writes regularly on experimental music, photography, cinema, and sound art. Professor Lee's teaching interests range from sound art to Africana philosophy, from speculative realism to the radical psychoanalytic tradition. Professor Lee has served as the National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor (1999-2002) and as the Judson M. Bemis Professor in the Humanities (2012-2015).

Representative Publications

"A Matter of Reasonably Abstracted Sensuality-Daido Moriyama: Record," Exposure Magazine (16 January 2018). [https://medium.com/exposure-magazine/a-matter-of-abstracted-sensuality-daido-moriyama-record-9b71a442a4c3]

"I Am Because We Are": Readings in Africana Philosophy. Revised edition. Edited with introductions by Fred Lee Hord and Jonathan Scott Lee. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016.

"Emi Anrakuji: Mapping Embodiment," The Space In Between (21 April 2015).
[the-space-in-between.com/2015/04/21/emi-anrakuji-mapping-embodiment/]

"Iannis Xenakis and the Presocratic Foundations of a New Music," Journal of Modern Greek Studies 29 (2011):73-82.

"The Testament of Julius Nyerere," in Judith Mbula Bahemuka and Joseph L. Brockington (eds.), East Africa in Transition: Communities, Cultures, and Change (Nairobi, Kenya: Acton Publishers, 2001), 208-223.

"Spike Lee's Malcolm X as Transformational Object," American Imago 52 (1995):155-167.

"Mimêsis and Beyond: Mallarmé, Boulez, and Cage," in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.),
Writings About John Cage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 180-212.

Jacques Lacan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

"Bodily Transcendence," a collaborative project with Nancy Spero, PsychCritique: The International Journal of Critical Psychology and Psychoanalysis 2 (1987):271-291.

"Omnipresence, Participation, and Eidetic Causation in Plotinus," in R. Baine Harris (ed.), The Structure of Being: A Neoplatonic Approach (Norfolk, VA: International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, 1982), 90-103.

"The Doctrine of Reception According to the Capacity of the Recipient in Ennead VI.4-5," Dionysius 3 (1979):79-97.

Regular Courses Taught

CC100 Philosophy as a Way of Life

PH101 Greek Philosophy

PH201 History of Modern European Philosophy

PH203 French Philosophy in Context: 1930 to the Present
(co-taught with Dennis McEnnerney in Paris)

PH247 Aesthetics

PH265 Sigmund Freud

PH281 Indian Philosophy

PH282 Africana Philosophy (co-taught with Christoper Hunt)

PH302 Recent Continental Philosophy