Dr. Frank Ruda is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Dundee.
His work marries Hegelianism with historical and contemporary continental philosophy, especially with the thought of Alain Badiou, and addresses questions of freedom, subjectivity, justice, and social change.
He is the author and editor of numerous books and edited volumes. Key publications include Hegel’s Rabble (2011), Abolishing Freedom (2016), The Dash (2018, with Rebecca Comay), and Indifference and Repetition (2023).
Ruda also co-edits the journal Crisis and Critique and co-hosts its podcast (https://open.spotify.com/show/71HTMeqGvlGvXUVnwmGySX).
Currently, his research focuses on the concept of courage in the context of contemporary crises and forthcoming in 2026 are two books: Reading Freud (with Agon Hamza and Slavoj Žižek) as well as Grotesque Sovereignty.

His talk in the PRISM Talk Series – Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries on Society and Mind explores Heidegger’s yet un(der)explored and peculiar philosophy of courage.
In his 1927 Being and Time Heidegger claims at one point that what comes with the fallenness that any being-there [Dasein] can suffer from, that is: to be in a state in which it does not appropriately determine itself, is the lack of a proper world. It manifests inter alia as practical and theoretical reign of the anonymous “They”, the “Anyone”: we get what “they” think and like and hate and love when we live in their (non-)“world.” But fallenness and the reign of the “anyone” presents itself not only as a peculiar lack of world – a transformation of the world into a mere environment –, it also paradigmatically and symptomatically appears as an absence of what Heidegger calls “the courage to be anxious [Mut zur Angst].” The very existence of a world thus seems to depend on a form of audacious anxiety, an anxified courage that undoes all certainties and stabilities.
The lecture will show how having a world ultimately is only thinkable under the condition of a peculiar readiness to lose it, which Heidegger himself addressed as a Weg-Sein, a being-not-there. Losing the world – the right way – then becomes a condition of having one in the first place.