Welcome to my web profile.

I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Iceland.

I studied philosophy in Boston and Berlin, and did my doctorate on the philosophy of Nietzsche. I continue to do Nietzsche-research, but have also done work in feminist and environmental philosophy. I am interested in the intersection of philosophy of embodied life and phenomenology, and have been working on the relation between Nietzsche´s philosophy and the philosophies of Arendt, Beauvoir, Irigaray and Butler. The issue of embodiment is one of the main philosophical discoveries of the 20th century and Nietzsche as a philosopher of the body and feminist philosophies of the body have laid the ground for the idea of the human being as embodied and hence relational, contextual and therefore individual in a more profound sense. Within feminist thought, I have been interested in transnational issues as one of the founders and first chair of the board of the United Nations University GEST-Programme at the University of Iceland (now Unesco,  https://www.grocentre.is/gest). I was part of the group that ran the Nordic Gender and Philosophy summer schools. I am presently working on a book project on the philosophy of the body as principle investigator of the international research project Embodied Critical Thinking (www.ect.hi.is) and of "Training Embodied Critical Thinking", a Erasmus+ funded training program for methodologies of embodied critical thinking. Ultimately it is about embodied philosophical thinking as transformative knowledge, as knowledge that changes us and as a way of thinking that is needed in times of the environmental challenges we are faced with. Feminine wisdom is also part of that transformative power, but one of my research areas has been the contribution of women thinkers to the history of philosophy. I recently co-edited a collection of essays on methodologies of the study of women in the history of philosophy, and I have published three calendars with short entries on women philosophers from the beginnings of philosophy to the present, one of them for the World Congress of Philosophy in 2018 in Beijing as chair of the committee for gender issues of FISP that sponsors the world congress. I am interested in politics in a global sense, but my politics presently is very much about transforming the field and discipline of philosophy itself in light of feminist knowledge. For I believe that embodied, philosophical thinking has much to contribute to education in general, and I have been learning and researching the methods of embodied philosophical thinking developed by Eugene Gendlin and within micro-phenomenology for that purpose. And yes: academic philosophy is a field that is both professional and personal for in philosophy we have to be our own laboratories.

Contact information

Office: Gimli, 3^rd floor, G316

Tel: +354 525 4049
Email: sigrthor@hi.is