Natan Elgabsi

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Centre of Excellence in Meliorist Philosophy of Suffering (MePhiS). My main research areas are the philosophy of historiography and the philosophy of writing (hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrativism), existential ethics, philosophy of history, the ethics of the human sciences, and memory studies. In particular, I have researched ideas about responsibility toward the past and ethical questions connected to historical writing and narration, with a focus on Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy.” I have authored Existential Ethics and the Philosophy of Historiography: Transgenerational Life and Memory in Literary Culture (2025) and co-edited Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History: A Cross-Cultural Approach (2023). Together with two colleagues, we lead the Centre for research in Memory, Testimony and Historiography (MYTH) at Åbo Akademi University.

In MePhiS, I research two interconnected themes: On the one hand, the ethical importance of freedom in contrast to fatalist configurations of suffering. These configurations of fate are exemplified, for instance, in tragic narrative but also imported into ideas about historicity as questions of life allotment, moral luck, destiny, or the historical necessity of suffering. The ideas are critically discussed in existential moral philosophy with an emphasis on freedom for the sake of others as the increasing realization of responsibility. On the other hand, I will investigate the potentialities of dystopia and apocalyptic fiction precisely as an actualization of the reading subject’s freedom and responsibility to force the future against necessity and apocalypse.