ORA GRUENGARD
Assitant
Professor, PhD,
Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Ramat Gan,
Israel
I was born in Jerusalem, Israel,
and grew up there. After my “military service” (which actually consisted in
living and working in a border Kibbutz), I returned to that town and studied
economics and philosophy (both for the BA and MA degrees). At that time I was
very interested in continental philosophy, and was glad to get a scholarship for
doctoral studies in France. I spent a year at the University of Lille (where
Prof. Erich Weil, has diverted for a while my preoccupation with Hegelian vs.
Husserlian phenomenology - and the Marxian counterpart to both - to Toqueville’s
study of the American democracy). I spent another year at the University of
Paris (where Prof. Gouhier encouraged me to go further with a former study about
Bergson in comparison to Whitehead and the American pragmatists). At the same
period I also got better acquainted with Nietzschean ideas and the approaches of
various existentialist thinkers. I When I came back to the Hebrew University I
found there a new atmosphere, where both continental and pragmatist philosophers
had to stand the attacks of analytical philosophers. I dedicated some times to
understand their claims and tools, and in that excursion added Wittgenstein to
my list of intriguing philosophers. At a later stage I added the equally
challenging voice of Levi-Strauss. My doctoral dissertation, which I presented
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, dealt with the conflicting voices, and
related also to my dissatisfaction with some presuppositions of liberal
economics. Its subject was the different approaches to the problem of
inter-subjectivity and their implications to social scientific presuppositions
and methodology.
After several years of
academic teaching and research (mainly at the University of Tel Aviv, I felt the
need to examine some controversial philosophical positions from the empirical
perspectives of the psychologists and psycho-linguistics, but encountered there
the same debates With that background my evolving interest in the philosophical
voices within psychoanalysis and against it was rather natural.
I also developed an
interest in the practical application of knowledge, and my subsequent study of
psychology, during a three years stay in New York, I was involved with both
empirical and clinical aspects. With my philosophical background I was, however,
quite selective, and looked for domains that would be compatible with my
skepticism. I went on to the study of cognitive psychology and family therapy,
but ended by practicing philosophical counseling.
During all that time I
continued to teach and write philosophy, looking for ways to make philosophy
more accessible for non-professionals, and fighting at the actual trend of some
schools to form “instant philosophers”, that are mobilized to use “critically”
philosophical slogans for practical causes, without understanding of nuances or
presuppositions, and without any raining for critical thinking.
I actually live in Tel
Aviv, am married, have two sons and one grandchild.
