Harris Bechtol

Dr. Bechtol earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Texas A&M University. He is a Lecturer in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Geography at Texas A&M University - San Antonio. His research focuses specifically on the nature, as well as the ethical and theological implications, of events as these have been examined within current debate in continental European philosophy. His first book-length project, entitled A Death of the World: Surviving the Death of the Other, is under contract at SUNY Press. He is currently working on revisions of the manuscript. In this book, he expands the philosophical conversation around the idea of an event by providing a phenomenological description of the experience of surviving the death of someone. This description is grounded in the post-Husserlian phenomenologies of the later Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. He argues in his book that death is more than just the loss of a person because the death of the other entails the loss of the meaningfulness of the world constituted with and by the other who has died. He argues for this by looking at how the death of the other transforms the spatiality and temporality of the world for those who survive such death. This project advances current debates in continental philosophy, especially phenomenology and hermeneutics.

Additionally, Dr. Bechtol’s next major research project is in the field of continental philosophy of religion where he explores the nature of religious faith in the aftermath of the death of God as found in the philosophies of Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Levinas, Simone Weil, Slavoj Žižek, and Julia Kristeva. This project examines the various spiritualities (i.e. ways of life) that are developed amidst the event-like character of existence. He has tentatively titled this project Continental Philosophy of Religion: Spiritualities Formed from the Desert.