Louise Shale Robinson

I have had an interest in peace from an early age; with my grandfather having been a conscientious objector during the second world war, I grew up hearing stories of his anti-war stance. My teenage readings of Marx and Lenin left me dissatisfied with the violence seemingly inherent in revolution and led me to enrolling in an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of Greenwich, in London, in search of alternatives. After graduating, I again found myself dissatisfied with the way peace was addressed (or not addressed) in philosophy, and so enrolled myself in a postgraduate degree in the field of Peace Studies – a nominally multidisciplinary discipline, taught as a social science – at the University of Bradford, UK. There I was exposed to a great number of approaches to peace but found a common theme between them all; their inability to define what peace is.Turning once again to philosophy I wrote my postgraduate thesis on the ways in which the early thought of Jean-Paul Sartre could be applied to the subjects of war and peace. After graduating I spent several years studying the thought of Martin Heidegger in a similar context, collaborating with different Heidegger scholars before eventually helping to found the European Centre for Heidegger Studies (ECHS).

I run a youtube channel about Heidegger and phenomenology more generally, which can be found here.