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8From Mitsein to Volk: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Geschichtlichkeit Question in HeideggerThe New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 21 357-375. 2023.Recent years have seen an accentuation in claims that early Heideggerian works are infected with totalitarian ideas that came to full realisation in the early 1930s. In challenging this claim, I suggest that the trajectory from Geschichtlichkeit and Mitsein in Being and Time to Heidegger’s later lamentable political involvements is both complicated and tenuous. After first defending this stance with reference to the account of Schuld in Being and Time, I draw substantively on the work of Jean-Lu…Read more
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16The Incomprehensible “Unworlded World”: Nature and Abyss in Heideggerian ThoughtJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 54 (4): 360-375. 2023.The complexities of Heidegger’s early accounts of nature provide a privileged perspective from which to understand the evolution of his thought into the 1930s and beyond. This movement seems largely driven by his response to what Karsten Harries has called “the antinomy of being”. In Heidegger’s early writings, Natur is associated with the “theoretical” and the “intraworldly.” However, less attested is an “unworlded” and thus intrinsically “incomprehensible” sense of nature, as the abyssal groun…Read more
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18Heidegger on (In)finitude and the Greco-Latin Grammar of BeingReview of Metaphysics 74 (2): 289-319. 2020.Heideggerian thought is routinely understood to involve an insistence on finitude, and a rejection of the metaphysical priority of the infinite. As a general rule, this characterization is adequate, but it risks a significant oversimplification of a complex theme in Heidegger’s thinking. After an initial discussion of his dominant position on (in)finitude, the paper focuses on a number of largely neglected and some recently published texts concerning Heidegger’s retrieval of the inheritance of…Read more
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18Thomism and Contemporary Phenomenological Realism: Toward a Renewed EngagementAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 95 (3). 2021.This paper looks to make a small contribution to the critical engagement between philosophical Thomism and phenomenology, inspired by the recent work of the German phenomenologist and hermeneutic thinker Günter Figal. My suggestion is that Figal’s proposal for a broad-based hermeneutical philosophy rooted in a renewed realism concerning things in their externality and “objectivity” provides great potential for a renewed encounter with Thomist realism. The paper takes up this issue through a brie…Read more
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24The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, edited by Graham Oppy: London: Routledge, 2015, pp. xv + 482, £150 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (4): 839-840. 2016.
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32‘Religion without God’, by Dworkin, Ronald: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. ix + 180, AU$29.95 (hardback) (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (3): 613-613. 2014.No abstract
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44Secular Spirituality and the Hermeneutics of Ontological GratitudeSophia 52 (1): 27-43. 2013.In his 2010 article, ‘Secular Spirituality and the Logic of Giving Thanks’, John Bishop recalls a striking theme in a recent address by Richard Dawkins in which he appeared to enthusiastically endorse the appropriateness of a ‘naturalised spirituality’ that involved ‘existential gratitude’, and this led him to investigate the notion of a naturalised or secular spirituality with particular reference to Robert Solomon’s Spirituality for the Skeptic (2002). This essay looks to pick up on Bishop’s e…Read more
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74Kierkegaard’s Subjective Ontology: A Metaphysics of the Existing IndividualInternational Philosophical Quarterly 44 (1): 5-22. 2004.In the context of the contemporary emergence of a “postmodern Kierkegaard,” I take issue with the idea that Kierkegaardian thought involves an anti-essentialist rejection of ontology. I argue that Kierkegaard’s keynote existential analysis is paralleled by, if not tacitly set within, a less developed yet explicit ontology of human being. This “subjective ontology” is at once an ontology of the existing subject and a subjectization of ontology. Thus, the essay has two aims. First, I seek to reviv…Read more
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228Between Ultra-essentialism and Post-essentialism: Kierkegaard as Transitional and ContemporaryContretemps: An Online Journal of Philosophy 3. 2002.
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17On Ex(s)istereProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 82 263-274. 2008.This paper looks to revive and advance dialogue surrounding John Nijenhuis’s case against ‘existence language’ as a rendering of Aquinas’s esse. Nijenhuis presented both a semantic/grammatical case for abandoning this practice as well as a more systematic argument based on his reading of Thomist metaphysics. On one hand, I affirm the important distinction between being and existence and lend qualified support to his interpretation of the quantitiative/qualitative correlation between esse and ess…Read more
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313Ernest Becker and Emmanuel Levinas: Surprising ConvergencesIn Daniel Liechty (ed.), Death and denial: interdisciplinary perspectives on the legacy of Ernest Becker, Praeger. pp. 175-184. 2002.After a brief introduction and orientation (section I), this dialogue between Levinasian and Beckerian thought is approached along the lines of two major themes concerning consciousness which emerge in very different contexts and registers in their work (sections II and III), and one tantalizing question that is raised with great force by the dialogue (section IV). The two themes revolve around the subtle dialectical interplay that runs throughout the thought of both Levinas and Becker – the swi…Read more
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74Rethinking Disagreement: Philosophical Incommensurability and Meta-PhilosophySymposium 18 (2): 33-53. 2014.Set in the context of the current interest among Analytic philosophers in the “epistemology of disagreement,” this paper explores the meta-philosophical problem of philosophical incommensurability. Motivated by Nietzsche’s provocative remark about philosophy as prejudices and desires of the heart “sifted and made abstract,” the paper first outlines the contours of the problem and then traces it through a series of examples. Drawing largely on the tradition of phenomenology and philosophical herm…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Continental Philosophy |
Philosophy of Religion |
History of Western Philosophy |