Detroit, Michigan, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Continental Philosophy
  •  7
    American Higher Education, the De-Worlding of World, and the Lessons of Situated Finitude
    Studies in Philosophy and Education 41 (5): 567-578. 2022.
    This essay offers a critique of the culture of specio-vocationalism in American higher education by first drawing on Edmund Husserl’s conception of “world” and connecting this notion to education conceived as a “world-disclosing” activity. The essay will then give an account of how the trends of vocationalization and specialization manifest themselves in contemporary university culture, and how they work together to “de-world” the lives of our students and deprive them of possibilities that are …Read more
  •  2
    Precarious Embodiment
    Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 5 (3). 2019.
    In this essay I endeavor to provide such an account, and describe at a pretheoretical level an embodied subjectivity at odds with its own state of embodiment, and on the other hand, to explore the limited agency induced by constraints that fall upon an embodied subject who is compelled to live a body which is free to engage the various possibilities of the world in every respect except one, within the context of an intercorporeal social reality. This description will provide a sound ontological …Read more
  •  5
    Detroit Bike City and the Reconstitution of Community
    Open Philosophy 3 (1): 716-729. 2020.
    In recent years a burgeoning bicycle culture has reanimated the city of Detroit. The following essay analyzes this reanimation through the themes of embodiment, mobility, spatiality, and the intersubjective creation of place, using the techniques of phenomenology. The description that emerges is an evolving social ontology with implications for cities like Detroit. In such cities any plan for re-urbanization must re-conceptualize both transportation schemas and public space on terrain once domin…Read more
  •  3
    Introduction: Back to the Things Themselves!
    with Astrida Neimanis
    Phaenex: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 3 (2). 2008.
    In this paper, I sketch out the way our bodies are engaged while commuting in order to elucidate several key aspects of the bodily experience of “in-between-ness.” I discover that within the rhythm and movement of the in-between, our bodies can open to a specific kind of conceptual creativity—an insight that I unfold in reference to the unanticipated innovation and transformation that accompanies other bodily experiences of in-between-ness more generally. This sketch, however, also demands that …Read more
  •  8
    The Fatally Flawed Leadership of Donald J. Trump
    Philosophy in the Contemporary World 25 (1): 49-60. 2019.
    Over the past two years, several political commentators have drawn on Plato’s Republic to shed light on our last presidential election. Many of these authors emphasize the features of democracy that make it especially susceptible to demagoguery, which heralds the arrival of tyranny, and then go on to relate this to Donald Trump’s political ascension. The problem with these analyses is that they tend to unquestioningly adopt Plato’s pessimistic view of democracy. While Plato’s criticisms do have …Read more
  •  4
    The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 55 (3): 639-640. 2002.
    The volume under review originated as a lecture course given by Martin Heidegger during the winter semester of 1929–30 at the University of Frieburg. The declared thesis of this tripartite-structured course was to determine the essence of philosophy through an interrogation of metaphysics.
  • Discrete Environments: Those Which Do Not Dwell
    International Studies in Philosophy 28 (2): 63-73. 1996.
  •  2
    9/1/1/01 and the Pull of History
    Glimpse 4 117-122. 2003.
  •  2
    Cellular Irruptions
    Glimpse 5 1-6. 2004.
  • The Question of Expression: Toward a Phenomenological Rhetoric
    Dissertation, Duquesne University. 1999.
    The project of phenomenology is the direct investigation of phenomena as consciously experienced, without recourse to theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions. The purpose of this investigation is intuit the "things themselves," or the essential structures of experience. Husserl tells us that this is to be achieved through a purely descriptive method, which in turn implies a means of communicating this pre-theoretical expe…Read more
  •  2
    Discrete environments: Those which do not dwell
    International Studies in Philosophy 28 (2): 63-73. 1996.
  •  28
    Introduction: Back to the Things Themselves! (again)
    with Astrida Neimanis
    PhaenEx 3 (2). 2008.
  •  21
    Afterword: Aude Describere!
    PhaenEx 3 (2): 179-194. 2008.
    This essay speaks to a certain kind of difficulty that stands in the way of doing phenomenology. I argue that this difficulty has its source in the sort of institutional structures many of us think and write under, which gives rise to a kind of attitude that tends to obscure or diminish the worth and promise of attending to the things themselves, phenomenologically. I refer to this attitude as the “exegetical attitude.” In attempting to make this attitude more manifest, I hope to further phenome…Read more
  •  23
    Here I Stand: Mediated Bodies in Dissent
    Mediatropes 2 (2): 109-127. 2010.
    Of all of the various forms of political dissent, the most dramatic as a form of expression is that which places lived bodies in tension with the prevailing social order. Bodies so presented—in marches, strikes, sit-ins, demonstrations and other mass assemblies—are just the opposite of Foucault’s docile bodies. They are a collective will concretized, an intersubjective mass animated by a common purpose that fills a public space and obstinately makes their shared demand. The presence of such diss…Read more
  •  39
    Torture
    International Journal of Applied Philosophy 23 (2): 305-314. 2009.
    This paper offers a phenomenological description of torture that delves beneath its mere physical effect on the human body, in order to demonstrate that bodily pain is only one dimension of the experiential structure of torture. In fact, this paper’s central claim is that torture is better understood as a radical ontological violation of a lived world through the body. This claim is supported through Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the embodied subject. The main purpose of this paper is to show that n…Read more
  •  4
    Incredulity
    Glimpse 6 73-77. 2004.
  •  9
    The Question Concerning Virtual Community
    Glimpse 3 (1): 33-37. 2001.