•  175
    Boehme, Hegel, Schelling, and the Hermetic Theology of Evil
    Philosophy and Theology 18 (2): 257-286. 2006.
    Building on recent research exposing Hegel’s debt to esoteric Christianity (both Gnostic and Hermetic traditions), the aim of this paper is to show how Hegel and Schelling resolve an ambiguity in Boehme’s theology of evil in opposing ways. Jacob Boehme’s notion of the individuation of God through the overcoming ofopposition is the central paradigm for both Hegel’s and Schelling’s understanding of the role of evil in the life of God. Boehme remains ambiguous on the question of the modality of evi…Read more
  •  121
    Schelling on the Unconscious
    Research in Phenomenology 40 (1): 72-91. 2010.
    The early Schelling and the romantics constructed the unconscious in order to overcome the modern split between subjectivity and nature, mind and body, a split legislated by Cartesian representationalism. Influenced by Boehme and Kabbalah, the later Schelling modified his notion of the unconscious to include the decision to be oneself, which must sink beneath consciousness so that it might serve as the ground of one's creative and personal acts. Slavoj Zizek has read the later Schelling's uncons…Read more
  •  100
    Heidegger and Duns Scotus on Truth and Language
    Review of Metaphysics 57 (2): 339-358. 2003.
    In his 1916 _Habilitationsschrift Heidegger enriched Husserl's notion of categorial intuition with Scotus's theory of intellection. The individual is entirely intelligible, even if its intelligibility is never fully defined. The historically singularized thing (essence modified by _haecceitas) speaks a primal word to us, and this original verbum makes possible the inner word of understanding, the _verbum interius. Heidegger argues that if the thing is actually intelligible in its singularity, hi…Read more
  •  80
    Adieu to James Bradley
    Analecta Hermeneutica 4. 2012.
  •  74
    The Facticity of Being God-Forsaken
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79 (2): 273-290. 2005.
    The early Freiburg lectures have shown us the degree to which Heidegger is influenced by Luther. In Being and Time, Heidegger designs a philosophy that can co-exist with a radical Lutheran theology of revelation. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity constitutes a polemic with the Scholastic idea of a natural desire for God and an accommodation of a theology of revelation. However, Heidegger’s implicit assent to the Lutheran concept of God-forsakenness is philosophically problematic. To be God-f…Read more
  •  63
    Schelling and the History of the Dissociative Self
    Symposium 19 (1): 52-66. 2015.
    This paper explores the possible therapeutical applications of Schellingian psychological principles. A Schellingian analysis would enable us to retrieve the largely forgotten heritage of Romantic psychiatry, in particular the dissociationist model of the psyche, which was strategically rejected by Freud and somewhat clumsily revised by Jung, but which has its own intelligibility and applicability. Schellingian analysis would be dissociationist rather than repressivist, and would depart from Fre…Read more
  •  60
    The Interpretive Structure of Truth in Heidegger
    Analecta Hermeneutica 1 46-55. 2009.
    This paper asks whether a ‘minimal correspondence theory of truth’ implicitly installs bi-valence as the necessary condition of every meaningful proposition
  •  58
    Alternative confessions, conflicting faiths: A review of the influence of Augustine on Heidegger (review)
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2): 317-335. 2008.
    The extent of the influence of Augustine on Heidegger, long only indicated in a few notes in Being and Time, has come into focus with the publicationof Heidegger’s earliest lectures. Far from one among many sources upon which Heidegger draws, we now know that Augustine’s Confessions is a central source of concepts for the early Heidegger. While this is further evidence of the ongoing relevance of Augustine to contemporary philosophy, it does not necessarily makeHeidegger an Augustinian thinker. …Read more
  •  53
    Introduction: Schelling After Theory
    with Tilottama Rajan
    Symposium 19 (1): 1-12. 2015.
  •  49
    The Psychology of Productive Dissociation, or What Would Schellingian Psychotherapy Look Like?
    Comparative and Continental Philosophy 6 (1): 35-48. 2014.
    Schelling has been exploited for a variety of psychoanalytical projects, from Marquard’s revision of Freud, to various readings of Jung, to Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan. What we have not seen is an elaboration of the psycho-therapeutical implications of Schelling’s metaphysics on its own terms. What we find when we read Schelling as metapsychologist is a nonpathologizing theory of dissociation. Like anything that lives, the psyche dissociates for the sake of growth. The law of productive diss…Read more
  •  48
    Is the late Schelling still doing nature-philosophy?
    Angelaki 21 (4): 121-141. 2016.
    I argue against current deflationary trends in Schelling scholarship that positive philosophy is not negative philosophy by other means but exceeds it in content and form. While nature-philosophy gives to positive philosophy the means to think the positive, the latter is not “natural” but revealed. I situate the turn to the positive in Schelling’s 1809 Freedom essay, which introduces the possibility of a real distinction between nature and God for the first time in Schelling’s thought, a possibi…Read more
  •  41
    The Absolute Question
    Analecta Hermeneutica 2 1-3. 2010.
  •  33
    In Defense of the Human Difference
    Environmental Philosophy 15 (1): 101-115. 2018.
    Against the prevalent trend in eco-criticism which is to deny the human difference, I summon a set of untimely tropes from metaphysics in the interest of advancing an ecological humanism: the difference in kind between human consciousness and animal sensibility; the uniquely human capacity for moral discernment; and the human being’s peculiar freedom from the material conditions of existence. While I agree with eco-critics who argue that anthropocenic nature is not only finite, but sick: sickene…Read more
  •  33
  •  30
    Revelation according to Schelling is not the possession of any institutional form of Christianity; it is not even bound to faith or confession. Rather, revelation disseminates itself freely and universally throughout history. It now inextricably permeates modernity. Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation does not look backwards to an event in the first century of the common era, it looks forward to the genuine singularity, the moment when humanity will become adequate to the divine subjectivity wh…Read more
  •  22
    In Defense of the Human Difference
    Environmental Philosophy 15 (1): 101-115. 2018.
    Against the prevalent trend in eco-criticism which is to deny the human difference, I summon a set of untimely tropes from metaphysics in the interest of advancing an ecological humanism: the difference in kind between human consciousness and animal sensibility; the uniquely human capacity for moral discernment; and the human being’s peculiar freedom from the material conditions of existence. While I agree with eco-critics who argue that anthropocenic nature is not only finite, but sick: sickene…Read more
  •  18
    In the academic year 1920-1921 at the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger gave a series of extraordinary lectures on the phenomenological significance of the religious thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine. The publication of these lectures in 1995 settled a long disputed question, the decisive role played by Christian theology in the development of Heidegger’s philosophy. The lectures present a special challenge to readers of Heidegger and theology alike. Experimenting with language and dr…Read more
  •  18
    Heidegger’s Analytic (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 59 (2): 411-413. 2005.
    Drawing an analogy with Kant, Carman argues that Being and Time is a transcendental analytic of the hermeneutic conditions of the possibility of intelligible experience. In defense of this thesis Carman makes a well-stated case for the implementation of the phenomenological attitude in the philosophy of mind. Against thinkers like Daniel Dennett, who insist on interpreting consciousness as a thing among things, Carman argues that intentionality, the defining feature of consciousness, can be prop…Read more
  •  13
    Introduction -- Tending the dark fire: the Boehmian notion of drive -- The night-side of nature: the early Schellingian unconscious -- The speculative psychology of dissociation: the later Schellingian unconscious -- Schellingian libido theory.
  •  7
    Rethinking German idealism (edited book)
    Palgrave-Macmillan. 2016.
    The ‘death’ of German Idealism has been decried innumerable times since its revolutionary inception, whether it be by the 19th-century critique of Western metaphysics, phenomenology, contemporary French philosophy, or analytic philosophy. Yet in the face of two hundred years of sustained, extremely rigorous attempts to leave behind its legacy, German Idealism has resisted its philosophical death sentence. For this exact reason it is timely ask: What remains of German Idealism? In what ways does …Read more
  •  5
    Volume 6, Issue 2, November 2019, Page 195-202.
  •  3
    Collected Essays in Speculative Philosophy
    with James Bradley
    Edinburgh University Press. 2021.
  •  2
    2 The Ecstatic Realism of the Late Schelling
    In Marie-Eve Morin (ed.), Continental Realism and its Discontents, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 38-58. 2017.