John Russon

John Russon (born 1960) is a Canadian philosopher, working primarily in the tradition of Continental Philosophy. In 2006, he was named Presidential Distinguished Professor at the University of Guelph, and in 2011 he was the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute's Canadian Lecturer to India.

Russon received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Toronto. His dissertation was entitled Hegel on the Body.

Russon is known for his original philosophical contributions, and also for his scholarly interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel, Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Ancient Philosophy.

Russon is known as an original philosopher, primarily through his books Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis and the Elements of Everyday Life and Bearing Witness to Epiphany. Leonard Lawlor describes Russon as "one of the few original voices working in Continental Philosophy today."Human Experience, which won the 2005 Broadview Press/Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize, brought together themes from Hegel, Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Ancient Philosophy, and produced an original interpretation of the development of personal identity. In this work Russon argues that the experiences through which we are inaugurated into any distinctive domain of meaning necessarily leave the stamp of their specific (and contingent) character on our subsequent experiences in that domain. He uses this notion to interpret the significance of family experience in the formation of personal identity, and he finds this aspect of our experience to be the key to understanding mental health (and mental illness). Russon's approach to mental health—in particular his interpretation of neurosis—is specially striking for its bringing together of the theme of embodiment that has been prominent in existential phenomenology with the theme of dialectical self-transformation that is prominent in the philosophy of Hegel and with the theme of the "system" of family life that is prominent in the work of such psychologists and family theorists as Salvador Minuchin, R.D. Laing and D.W. Winnicott. This work is also important for its use of these ideas to criticize the "individualist" premises of much political and economic theory, and to develop of a political theory of multiculturalism. His interpretation of the dynamic and transformative role of sexuality (eros) provides an important link between his work and the philosophy of Plato. The importance of sexuality to personal development, and especially its relationship to ethical life and to artistic creativity is further explored in Bearing Witness to Epiphany, his most recent work. Like Human Experience, this work stands out for its emphasis on the way that the important dimensions of our experience are embodied in the most basic material dimensions of our lives—everyday "things" and basic bodily practices—and this work thus offers a new metaphysics of "the thing" and of reality in general, arguing that issues of metaphysics cannot be separated from issues of ethics.

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