Keren Gorodeisky

My work explores our nature as human by focusing on: (1) the distinctive affective character, rationality, and value of our aesthetic engagements, (2) the spontaneous-receptive character of human emotions, which, I argue, are distinctively rational exercises of human agency, yet receptive, embodied, and vulnerable ways of being in the world, and (3) our second-personal relationships with each other. My first monograph, "Beholden to Beauty: Aesthetic Value and the Authority of Pleasure," is forthcoming with OUP. It portrays aesthetic appreciation as an affective yet distinctively rational, agential, and universal, albeit tied to who we are as persons and as sociable beings. Like other human emotions, aesthetic appreciation is an exercise of an affective capacity of reason.