Dan Zahavi (born 1967) is a Danish philosopher. He is professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen.

Dan Zahavi was born in Copenhagen, Denmark to an Israeli father and a Danish mother. He initially studied phenomenology at the University of Copenhagen. In 1994, he obtained his PhD from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, with Rudolf Bernet as his doctoral supervisor. In 1999, he defended his Danish disputats (habilitation) at the University of Copenhagen. In 2002, he became professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. In the period 2018–21, he was also professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is married to the Austrian philosopher Sophie Loidolt.

Zahavi writes on phenomenology (especially the philosophy of Edmund Husserl) and philosophy of mind. In his writings, he has dealt extensively with topics such as self, self-consciousness, intersubjectivity and social cognition. In the period 2007-2025 he was co-editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Zahavi's work has been translated into more than 30 languages.

In several books and articles, Zahavi has defended the existence and significance of pre-reflective self-consciousness, and argued in favor of the idea that our experiential life is characterized by a form of self-consciousness that is more primitive and more fundamental than the reflective form of self-consciousness that one finds in various kinds of introspection. More generally speaking, Zahavi has spoken out against different reductionist approaches to consciousness, and insisted on the theoretical significance of subjectivity and the first-person perspective.

In working on these issues, Zahavi has collaborated and debated with psychiatrists, developmental psychologists, and Buddhist scholars. Critics have included those who either deny the existence of self or the existence of pre-reflective self-consciousness.

Another part of Zahavi's work has focused on problems related to intersubjectivity, empathy, and social cognition. His PhD thesis defended a phenomenological approach to intersubjectivity. In various papers and books since then he has in particular focused on the role and structure of empathy. He has argued in favor of the bodily and contextual character of interpersonal understanding, and criticized dominant positions within the so-called ’theory of mind’ debate, including simulation theory and theory-theory.

Since 2010, Zahavi has worked increasingly on social emotions and on issues in social ontology. He has written on shame, on shared emotions, we-experiences, collective intentionality, and the importance of the I–thou relation.

In parallel with his systematic work on the above-mentioned topics, Zahavi has also written on phenomenology, especially the work of Edmund Husserl. He has argued that phenomenology is a powerful and systematically convincing voice that contemporary philosophy and empirical science shouldn’t ignore. In addition to offering extensive analyses of Husserl’s analyses of intersubjectivity and self- and time-consciousness, Zahavi has also discussed the nature of Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and the metaphysical implications of phenomenology in various publications. Throughout his work, Zahavi has criticized what he takes to be overly simplistic interpretations of Husserl that depicts the latter as a solipsist and subjective idealist, and instead accentuated the continuity between Husserl’s phenomenology and the work of post-Husserlian phenomenologists, especially that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.