Jan Zwicky

Jan Zwicky (born 10 May 1955) is a Canadian philosopher, poet, essayist, and musician.

Zwicky received her BA from the University of Calgary and earned her PhD at the University of Toronto in 1981 where her studies focussed on the philosophy of logic and science. She subsequently taught philosophy at Princeton University; philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities at the University of Waterloo; philosophy at the University of Western Ontario; philosophy, English, and creative writing at the University of New Brunswick; and philosophy at the University of Alberta.

Zwicky is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, where she taught both philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities courses from 1996 until 2009. She has served as a faculty member at the Banff Centre Writing Studio, has conducted numerous writing workshops, and edits regularly for Brick Books.

Zwicky is an eco-political and anti-colonial thinker, comparable to fellow Canadian poets Tim Lilburn and Don McKay, who promotes the fundamental unity of ontology and ethics by laying emphasis on the act of attention.

Heraclitus, Plato, Freud, Virginia Woolf and Wittgenstein are among the thinkers who figure prominently in her philosophical work, which challenges the hegemonic status of logico-linguistic analysis in 20th and 21st Century Anglo-American philosophy. She has developed the notion of resonance as central to the understanding of ontological structures, and argues for its relevance in epistemology.