Susan Neiman

Susan Neiman is an American writer and philosopher. She was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. Although she dropped out of high school in the late 1960s, her reading of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre led her to study philosophy, first at night school at the City College of New York and later at Harvard University, where she earned her doctorate under John Rawls and Stanley Cavell. A Fulbright scholarship took her to Berlin, where she spent six years in the 1980s. She has written extensively on the intersection of Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, for both scholarly and general audiences. Slow Fire, a memoir of her life as a Jew in Berlin at the time, won the PEN Award for Best Nonfiction in 1992. From 1989 to 1995, she was an assistant and associate professor at Yale University, and from 1996 to 2000, she was an associate professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. In 2000, she became director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. Her books, most notably Learning from Germans, Evil in Modern Thought. An Alternative History of Philosophy, and Moral Clarity. A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, have been translated into many languages. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften, and a mother of three adult children.