On April 4, scholar John Protevi spoke at Elmhurst College on the topic Human Nature: Between Philosophy and Anthropology.

His talk was this year’s Niebuhr Lecture.

A professor at Louisiana State University, Protevi teaches courses primarily in contemporary French philosophy. His research focuses on the intersections of contemporary French philosophy, dynamical systems theory, and the cognitive, life and earth sciences.

Protevi received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Loyola University Chicago in 1990. A longtime member of French studies faculty at LSU, he recently was named Phyllis M. Taylor Professor of French Studies. In 2012, he became professor of philosophy with teaching duties in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies.

He is the author of Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (Minnesota, 2013); Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minnesota, 2009); Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic (Athlone, 2001); Time and Exteriority: Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida (Bucknell, 1994); and co-author with Mark Bonta of Deleuze and Geophilosophy (Edinburgh, 2004). He also is the editor of A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy (Yale, 2006).