Hagi Kenaan (PhD Yale University) is a professor of philosophy at the Philosophy Department at Tel Aviv University and Editor-in-chief of Iyyun: The Jerusalem Journal of Philosophy. He specializes in twentieth century continental philosophy — phenomenology and post-phenomenology, philosophy of existence, hermeneutics and deconstruction — with particular attention to aesthetics and the philosophy of art. In recent years, his work has focused on the ontology and ethics of images, from cave art to street art to photography and VR. One of the main motivations for his writing on these subjects lies in the understanding that (1) The image — with its roots in the imagination — is an intrinsic existential dimension of the human; (2) Today, an all-encompassing capitalist visual order gradually prevails over and radically levels the sphere of everyday experience; And that (3) we need to find alternatives to the logic of the new capitalism, alternatives that depend on new creative ways of living with images while guarding the precarious openness of the imagination.

Hagi Kenaan is co-editor of Philosophy’s Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking (Springer, 2011). He is the author of The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language (Columbia University Press, 2005); The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze (Tauris 2013) — its French version Visage(s): Une autre éthique du regard après Levinas (Editions de l'éclat); Photography and Its Shadow (Stanford University Press, 2020); and most recently — co-authored with Y. Senderowicz, Time: Nine Philosophical Dialogues (Resling, 2022).