How does compassion play in politics?

Nicolas de Warren has  studied in Paris, Heidelberg, and Boston and graduated with a PhD from Boston University in 2001. He has written more than 60 articles, most recently published an edited volume on Neo-Kantianism, and a book on Husserl and the problem of time will appear in Italian translation this year. In 2013 he was the recipient of a European Research Council grant for a project on the impact of the First World War on 20th-century philosophy, which led to his recent publication German Philosophy and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

In Original Forgiveness, Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (2020), Nicolas de Warren challenges the widespread assumption that forgiveness is always a response to something that has incited it. Rather than considering forgiveness exclusively in terms of an encounter between individuals or groups after injury, he argues that availability for the possibility of forgiveness represents an original forgiveness, an essential condition for the prospect of human relations. De Warren develops this notion of original forgiveness through a reflection on the indispensability of trust for human existence, as well as an examination of the refusal or unavailability to forgive in the aftermath of moral harms.