Noam Cohen

About

I am a philosopher, working on the themes of selfhood, sociality, and drives, engaging both historical and contemporary philosophy. I explore these themes from multiple angles in phenomenology – particularly in Heidegger and Husserl – and in ancient philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle. While my work spans several domains, the question that motivates my research as a whole is how to maintain an account of our individual selves as autonomous, while acknowledging our relations of dependence on things and forces beyond our immediate control or awareness – such as affectivity, nature, and others. I approach the history of philosophy as a living tradition, rich with ideas that remain vital to contemporary philosophical inquiry.

My book, Heidegger on Sociality (Cambridge University Press, 2026), pursues this question through Heidegger's account of our being with others, proposing an understanding of the self as a dependent part of an unfolding shared whole that nonetheless retains its relative wholeness. [Read more →]

As a Minerva Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellow at the Section for Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy in the Department of General Psychiatry at Heidelberg University, I am currently working on a project that investigates the lived experience of instincts and drives, and how this experience serves as a foundation for our personal identity. Previously, I was a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University.

You can reach me by email. Some of my work is available on PhilPeople and Academia.edu.