King's Philosophy Professor wins SSHRC Insight Grant

King’s Philosophy professor Antonio Calcagno was honoured by being awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Reseach Council (SSHRC) INSIGHT grant for a project titled Edith Stein and Gerda Walther: Law and Community in Early Phenomenology. The awarded grant is for five years and is worth $75,000.

Phenomenology is the science of studying phenomena as distinct from that of the nature of being, consciousness and the objects of direct experience. 

Dr. Calcagno’s work is focused on the social and political studies of Edith Stein (1891-1942) and Gerda Walther (1897-1977), both who Dr. Calcagno has written  “provide a rich philosophical investigation of how the phenomenological mind comes to understand and inform social objectivities, including the mass, society, community and the state. Both philosophers maintain that communal relations, in particular, provide the most complex and comprehensive base for building higher social objectivities like the state. In other words, a state exists not only because of material, historical, economic and geographical circumstances, but also because the social relations among the inhabitants of the state are deeply conditioned by certain forms of consciousness or states of mind that coincide with the aforementioned relations.”

With his research, Dr. Calcagno hopes to “defend the claim that law is essential for a phenomenological understanding of the life of social objectivities, a claim that has been ignored by most scholarly literature on the phenomenology of the social world. I also wish to show how phenomenology, through the works of Stein and Walther, can provide both an a priori, formal as well as an empirical historically situated account of law and social relations.”

King’s University College congratulates Dr. Calcagno on his grant, and wish him all the best with his research.