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41The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Existentialism (edited book)Routledge. 2024.Essential reading for students and researchers of existentialism and phenomenology, and also of interest to those studying ethics, philosophy and gender, philosophy of race, the emotions and philosophical issues in health and illness as well as related disciplines such as Literature, Sociology, and Political Theory.
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13One beat more: existentialism and the gift of mortalityPolity Press. 2022.A keen athlete in his late forties, philosophy professor Kevin Aho hadn't given much thought to his own mortality, until he suffered a sudden heart attack that left him fighting for his life. Confronted with death for the first time, he realized that the things he thought gave his life meaning, such as his independence or his ability to plan his own future, were in tatters. Aho turned to those thinkers who have reflected deeply on the meaning of life and the anxiety of living when every heartbea…Read more
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10Review of Domonkos Sik, Empty suffering: a social phenomenology of depression, anxiety, and addiction, London and New York: Routledge, 2022 (review)Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 23 (2): 473-477. 2024.
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6“We’re protecting them to death”—A Heideggerian interpretation of loneliness among older adults in long-term care facilities during COVID-19Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (5): 1053-1066. 2023.In this paper, I draw on Heidegger’s phenomenology of “moods” (_Stimmungen_) to interpret loneliness as a diffused and atmospheric feeling-state that often undergirds the lives of older adults, shaping the ways in which they are attuned to and make sense of the world. I focus specifically on residents in long-term care facilities to show how the social isolation and lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically intensified the mood. The aim is to shed light on how profound and totalizi…Read more
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16The Uncanny in the Time of PandemicsGatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 10 1-19. 2020.This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of Heidegger’s account of “the uncanny” as it relates to the coronavirus pandemic. It explores how the pandemic has disrupted Dasein’s sense of “homelike” familiarity and how this disruption has undermined our ability to be, that is, to understand or make sense of things. By examining our experience of temporality, lived-space, and intersubjectivity, the paper illuminates different ways in which the pandemic has left us confused and anxious about our…Read more
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9Heidegger on Melancholia, Deep Boredom, and the Inability-to-BePhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 27 (3): 215-217. 2020.In her article, “Melancholia, temporal disruption, and the torment of being both unable to live and unable to die,” Emily Hughes offers a provocative and powerful analysis of an experiential aspect of depression that is often overlooked in the psychiatric literature. Drawing on Heidegger’s account of ontological death, what he calls “dying” in Being and Time, Hughes illuminates how episodes of major depression can disrupt the synchronous unity of time that structures our experience and gives mea…Read more
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11Temporal experience in anxiety: embodiment, selfhood, and the collapse of meaningPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19 (2): 259-270. 2020.This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account …Read more
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5Contexts of Suffering: A Heideggerian Approach to PsychopathologyRowman & Littlefield International. 2019.This book explores new phenomenological research on the structural disruptions of spatiality, temporality, and understanding in the context of anxiety and depressive disorders. It offers critiques of mainstream psychopathology, taking a transdisciplinary approach to the relationship between mental illness and self-constitution.
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6Neurasthenia Revisited: On Medically Unexplained Syndromes and the Value of Hermeneutic MedicineJournal of Applied Hermeneutics 2018 (1). 2018.The rise of medically unexplained conditions like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome in the United States looks remarkably similar to the explosion of neurasthenia diagnoses in the late nineteenth century. In this paper, I argue the historical connection between neurasthenia and today’s medically unexplained conditions hinges largely on the uncritical acceptance of naturalism in medicine. I show how this cultural acceptance shapes the way in which we interpret and make sense of nervous di…Read more
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4Existential Medicine: Essays on Health and Illness (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield. 2018.This book offers cutting edge research on the modifications and disruptions of bodily experience in the context of anxiety, depression, trauma, chronic illness, pain, and aging. It presents original contributions in applied phenomenology, biomedical ethics, and the use of medical technologies.
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13Temporal experience in anxiety: embodiment, selfhood, and the collapse of meaningPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1-12. 2018.This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account …Read more
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4Gender and TimeEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (1): 137-155. 2007.Many critics have attempted to give an account of a gendered incarnation of Dasein in response to Heidegger’s “neutral” or “asexual” interpretation. In this paper,I suggest gendered readings of Dasein are potentially misleading. I argue Dasein is gendered only to the extent that “the Anyone” (das Man)—understood as relational background of social practices, institutions, and languages—constitutes the space or “clearing” (Lichtung) of intelligibility. However, this reading misrepresents the core …Read more
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4Metontology and the Body-Problem in Being and TimeAuslegung 28 (1). 2006.This article introduces Heidegger's notion of metontology as a way to address the body-problem in Being and Time
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22Depression and embodiment: phenomenological reflections on motility, affectivity, and transcendenceMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 16 (4): 751-759. 2013.This paper integrates personal narratives with the methods of phenomenology in order to draw some general conclusions about ‘what it means’ and ‘what it feels like’ to be depressed. The analysis has three parts. First, it explores the ways in which depression disrupts everyday experiences of spatial orientation and motility. This disruption makes it difficult for the person to move and perform basic functional tasks, resulting in a collapse or contraction of the life-world. Second, it illustrate…Read more
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The bodyIn Francois Raffoul & Eric S. Nelson (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 269. 2013.
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13Heidegger's Neglect of the BodyState University of New York Press. 2009._Challenges conventional understandings of Heidegger’s account of the body._
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5Simmel on Acceleration, Boredom, and Extreme AesthesiaJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37 (4): 447-462. 2007.By focusing on the unique velocity and over-stimulation of metropolitan life, Georg Simmel pioneered an interpretation of cultural boredom that has had a significant impact on contemporary social theory by viewing it through the modern experience of time-pressure and social acceleration. This paper explores Simmel's account of boredom by showing how--in the frenzy of modern life--it has become increasingly difficult to qualitatively distinguish which choices and commitments actually matter to u…Read more
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5The Psychopathology of American Shyness: A Hermeneutic ReadingJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 40 (2): 190-206. 2010.
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15Medicalized Psychiatry and the Talking Cure: A Hermeneutic InterventionHuman Studies 34 (3): 293-308. 2011.The dominance of the medical-model in American psychiatry over the last 30 years has resulted in the subsequent decline of the “talking cure”. In this paper, we identify a number of problems associated with medicalized psychiatry, focusing primarily on how it conceptualizes the self as a de-contextualized set of symptoms. Drawing on the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology, we argue that medicalized psychiatry invariably overlooks the fact that our identities, and the meanings and values that …Read more
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11Existentialism: An IntroductionPolity. 2014.Provides an accessible and scholarly introduction to the core ideas of the existentialist tradition. Kevin Aho draws on a wide range of existentialist thinkers in chapters centering on the key themes of freedom, being-in-the-world, alienation, nihilism, anxiety and authenticity. He also addresses important but often overlooked issues in the canon of existentialism, with discussions devoted to the role of embodiment, the movement's contribution to ethics, politics, and environmental and comparati…Read more
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Acceleration and Time Pathologies: The Critique of Psychology in Heidegger's BeiträgeTime and Society 16 (1): 25-42. 2007.In his Contributions to Philosophy, Martin Heidegger introduces "acceleration" as one of the three symptoms--along with "calculation" and the "outbreak of massiveness"--of our technological way of "being-in-the-world." In this article, I unpack the relationship between these symptoms and draw a twofold conclusion. First, interpreting acceleration in terms of time pathologies, I suggest the self is becoming increasingly fragmented and emotionally overwhelmed from chronic sensory arousal and time…Read more
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8The missing dialogue between Heidegger and Merleau-ponty: On the importance of the zollikon seminarsBody and Society 11 (2): 1-23. 2005.Heidegger’s failure to discuss ‘the body’ in Being and Time has generated a cottage industry of criticism. In his recently translated Zollikon Seminars, Heidegger provides a response to the critics by offering a thematic account of the body that is strikingly similar to Merleau-Ponty’s account in Phenomenology of Perception. In this article, I draw on the parallels between these two texts in order to see how Heidegger’s neglect of the body affects his early project of fundamental ontology and to…Read more
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6Heidegger, ontological death, and the healing professionsMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 19 (1): 55-63. 2016.In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger introduces a unique interpretation of death as a kind of world-collapse or breakdown of meaning that strips away our ability to understand and make sense of who we are. This is an ‘ontological death’ in the sense that we cannot be anything because the intelligible world that we draw on to fashion our identities and sustain our sense of self has lost all significance. On this account, death is not only an event that we can physiologically live through; it can h…Read more
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15Assessing the role of virtue ethics in psychology: A commentary on the work of Blaine Fowers, Frank Richardson, and Brent SlifeJournal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 32 (1): 43-49. 2012.Drawing on the work of Fowers, Richardson, and Slife, this commentary offers an overview and critical assessment of the theory and practice of virtue ethics in psychology. The commentary highlights the importance of a hermeneutic or relational understanding of selfhood and the value of interpreting human meanings within the context of a shared tradition. I conclude with some critical remarks that focus on reconciling the assumptions of naturalism with hermeneutic philosophy, the issue of conserv…Read more
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6Recovering play; On the relationship between leisure and authenticity in Heidegger‟ s thoughtJanus Head 10 (1): 217-238. 2007.This paper attempts to reconcile, what appear to be, two conflicting accounts of authenticity in Heidegger’s thought. Authenticity in Being and Time is commonly interpreted in ‘existentialist’ terms as willful commitment and resoluteness in the face of one’s own death but, by the late 1930’s, is reintroduced in terms of Gelassenheit, as a non-willful openness that “lets beings be.” By employing Heidegger’s conception of authentic historicality , understood as the retrieval of Dasein’s past, and …Read more
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6Gender and TimeEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (1): 137-155. 2007.Many critics have attempted to give an account of a gendered incarnation of Dasein in response to Heidegger’s “neutral” or “asexual” interpretation. In this paper,I suggest gendered readings of Dasein are potentially misleading. I argue Dasein is gendered only to the extent that “the Anyone” (das Man)—understood as relational background of social practices, institutions, and languages—constitutes the space or “clearing” (Lichtung) of intelligibility. However, this reading misrepresents the core …Read more
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Animality Revisited: The Question of Life in Heidegger's Early Freiburg LecturesExistentia 16 (5-6): 379-392. 2006.Heidegger's assessment of animals in his 1929/30 Freiburg lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, has been the focal point of much recent debate. In this course, it appears Heidegger preserves the prejudices of metaphysical humanism by establishing an opposition between animal "behavior" (Benehmen) and human "comportment" (Verhalten) to the extent that humans, unlike animals, embody an understanding of being and, therefore, encounter beings as such. In this essay, I suggest th…Read more
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14Why Heidegger Is Not An Existentialist: Interpreting Authenticity And Historicity In Being And TimeFlorida Philosophical Review 3 (2): 5-22. 2003.Heidegger's Being and Time is often interpreted as an important contribution to the canon of Existentialist philosophy. This popular interpretation is due largely to the theme of "authenticity" that is carefully developed in Division II. Here, Heidegger explains how we, as human beings, can temporarily sever ourselves from our bondage to a "fallen" public world by owning up to the anxious awareness of our inevitable death. It is in resolutely facing death that we can become individuals for the f…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Health and Illness |
Philosophy of Psychiatry and Psychopathology |
Existentialism |
Martin Heidegger |
Phenomenology, Misc |