Jan Slaby

Jan Slaby is Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Emotion at Freie Universität Berlin. He works on many topics connected to affect and emotion, and develops what he calls a political philosophy of mind — an integrative framework that brings enactivism, extended and embodied mind approaches into dialogue with critical theory, phenomenology, and social philosophy, asking how societal structures produce, shape, and often deform, mental capacities and affective lives.

Affect and emotion are among his central concerns: as dynamic relational forces that bind individuals to their environments while constituting the shifting core of selfhood and subjectivity. His current work develops a theory of societal unfeeling — diagnosing the affective underpinnings of destructive society-nature relations. Recent publications include the articles Structural Apathy (2023) and Habits of Affluence (2024). He has co-edited, with Christian von Scheve, two Routledge volumes on Key Concepts in Affective Societies (2019 & 2026).