Congratulations to Willi Goetschel for being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, one of the highest honours available to an academic in Canada. As an internationally acclaimed philosopher, literary historian, and leader in the field of German Jewish thought in Canada, Goetschel, cross-appointed to the Departments of Philosophy and Germanic Languages & Literatures, has advanced research on the nexus between thought and literary imagination. Situated at the interface between philosophy and literature, in particular in modern Jewish thought, his work has helped recover marginalized approaches to critical thinking, articulating emancipatory strategies to freshly imagine the terms of difference, alterity, and identity.
Educated and trained in Switzerland and the United States, Goetschel says he feels “deeply honoured for this recognition of my work in the country that has become my home for the past 25 years.”
He has authored four books: Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis (1994), Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (2003), The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought (2013), and Heine and Critical Theory (2019). A fifth, tentatively titled “Difference and Alterity in Early Modern Thought: La Boétie, Montaigne, Mendelssohn and Spinoza,” is nearing completion. Additionally, Goetschel has edited or co-edited a number of volumes, foremost among them perhaps The Collected Works of Hermann Levin Goldschmidt (9 vols.). In fact, Goetschel deserves credit for putting the work of this German Jewish philosopher and exile, who lived between 1914 and 1998, on the map of international scholarship.
In 2020, in recognition of a lifetime of scholarly work that advanced “enlightened reason, the tolerant co-operation between cultures and religious creeds, and the valuation of the humanities and of philosophy,” Goetschel received the Moses Mendelssohn Prize of the City of Dessau, Mendelssohn’s birth city.
His teaching in German, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, the Program in Literature and Critical Theory, and in Jewish Studies, as well as his additional affiliation with the Department of the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, further document his commitment to taking interdisciplinary research to the classroom. Conversely, many of his research projects, he says, have their origin in Goetschel’s teaching.
Goetschel currently serves as the president of the North American Heine Society and as the general editor of Bamidbar: Journal for Jewish Thought and Philosophy, a publication he co-founded.
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