Dan Zahavi

Since 2010, Zahavi has worked increasingly on social emotions and on issues in social ontology. He has written on shame, on shared emotions, we-experiences, collective intentionality, and the importance of the I–thou relation.

Zahavi is the director of the Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS), established in 2002 on the basis of funding from the Danish National Research Foundation. Since 2002, CFS has been working on topics related to selfhood and sociality and has actively promoted a research strategy involving collaboration between different philosophical tradition and between philosophy and empirical science, in particular psychiatry. After the expiration of the funding from the Danish National Research Foundation in 2012, CFS has continued its research with support from a variety of both Danish and European public and private foundations. Since 2010, CFS has organized an annual summer school in phenomenology and philosophy of mind that typically attracts around 100 students from all over the world.

Dan Zahavi was born in Copenhagen, Denmark to an Israeli father and a Danish mother. He initially studied phenomenology at the University of Copenhagen. He obtained his PhD in 1994 from the Husserl Archives at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium, with Rudolf Bernet as his doctoral supervisor. In 1999 he defended his Danish Disputats (Habilitation) at the University of Copenhagen. In 2002, at the age of 34, he became Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. In the period 2018-2021, he was also Professor of Philosophy at University of Oxford.

Dan Zahavi (born 1967) is a Danish philosopher. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen.