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32Human Aging and EntropyTechnophany 2 (1). 2024.In this paper I argue that the contemporary pathologizing of old age is directly tied to the notion of uselessness, understood entropically as that which cannot contribute energy for useful work. The elderly are configured as socially useless and thus threaten the health of the body politic. As a result, they are marginalized, ignored, and treated as waste to be jettisoned from the system. Because understanding bodies as machines able or unable to perform work accords with the second law of ther…Read more
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15Tensional Landscapes: The Dynamics of Boundaries and Placements (edited book)Lexington Books. 2003.The contributors to this volume address global, regional, and local landscapes, cosmopolitan and indigenous cultures, and human and more-than-human ecology as they work to reveal place-specific tensional dynamics. This unusual book, which covers a wide-ranging array of topics, coheres into a work that will be a valuable reference for scholars of geography and the philosophy of place
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17The Failure of Female Identity in Simone de Beauvoir's FictionIn Laura Hengehold & Nancy Bauer (eds.), A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, Wiley. 2017.For Beauvoir, literature provides unique access into the concrete life out of which philosophical reflection is born. Nowhere are the complications of ambiguous ethical choice more sensitively portrayed in her writings than in her fictional characters – particularly her women – as they navigate their way through webs of deceit, patriarchal control, manipulation, authenticity, desire, and passion in an attempt to ground their identities in a kind of absolute meaning. This chapter explores the the…Read more
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15Berserker in a SkirtIn William Irwin & Christopher Robichaud (eds.), Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy, Wiley. 2014-09-19.The deeply imaginative structure of Dungeons Dragons (DD) can allow for players to explore the intricacies of gender and sexuality in creative and potentially radical ways. One would be hard pressed to argue that cartoonishly large breasts and skin‐tight leather skirts really allow for dexterous swordplay or quick getaways. DD liberates us from the limitations of our sex by making male and female characters equal in terms of abilities. The shyest of men can be the most outspoken of wizards, the …Read more
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22The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction, by Fabbri, LorenzoComparative and Continental Philosophy 2 (2): 311-312. 2010.
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Book Reviews (review)Sartre Studies International 16 (2): 114-137. 2010.David Detmer, Sartre Explained Review by Nicholas J. Wernicki Christine Daigle and Jacob Golomb, eds., Beauvoir & Sartre: The Riddle of Influence Review by Shannon M. Mussett John Foley, Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt Review by Adrian van den Hoven Sebastian Gardner, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: A Reader’s Guide Review by Matthew C. Eshleman.
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29Moving Beyond Hegel: The Paradox of Immanent Freedom in Simone de Beauvoir’s PhilosophyIn Cynthia D. Coe (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Phenomenology, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 153-172. 2021.This paper explores Simone de Beauvoir’s response to G. W. F. Hegel’s formulation of freedom. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes freedom as a twofold, negative movement of dissolution and construction. Beauvoir takes up this distinction in terms of revolution and creative transformation, additionally describing two empty articulations of freedom found in “complaint” and “resignation.” In complaint, the existent is unable to transform the situation in a positive sense and simply reac…Read more
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24The Contradictions of Freedom: Philosophical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir's the Mandarins (edited book)State University of New York Press. 2005._The essential companion to Simone de Beauvoir's celebrated novel._
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24Entropic Philosophy: Chaos, Breakdown, and CreationRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2022.Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book traces the development of entropic themes, capturing phenomena ranging from chaos, disorder, homogenization, slackening, disspation, and ultimately death.
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52Time, Money, and Race: Simone de Beauvoir on American AbstractionJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy 28 (2). 2020.In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir traveled to the United States for a four-month stay, during which she toured the country extensively. Her copious notes taken during this time eventually became the travelogue, America Day by Day as well as a piece written for the May 25, 1947 edition of the New York Times Magazine, “An Existentialist Looks at Americans.” In both of these writings, Beauvoir offers an astute criticism of American culture from a foreign perspective. This paper explores Beauvoir’s treatm…Read more
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33Death and Sacrifice in Hegel’s Philosophy of NatureEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (1): 119-134. 2017.This paper explores a dimension of the contemporary western understanding of nature as it has been shaped by the thought of Hegel. Emblematic of a tradition that struggles to think nature on its own terms but which, more often than not, formulates it as the ground upon which human progress is built, Hegel’s philosophy sacrifices nature to spiritual progress. Orienting this study through Dennis J. Schmidt’s work on death and sacrifice in the dialectic, I trace Hegel’s formulation of the natural t…Read more
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28Life and Sexual Difference in Hegel and BeauvoirJournal of Speculative Philosophy 31 (3): 396-408. 2017.Much maligned for deeply problematic language describing female physiology and its peculiar use of "data," Simone de Beauvoir's chapter on biology from The Second Sex appears to be an unusual entry point into the question of woman as Other. In "Biological Data," Beauvoir traces a relationship between the female animal and the species that becomes more alarming as she moves from unicellular organisms to complex mammalian life. By the time she reaches human beings, we are bombarded with passages e…Read more
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Binding Nature and Freedom: Hegelian Themes of Liberation and Oppression in Simone de BeauvoirDissertation, Villanova University. 2002.This dissertation investigates Simone de Beauvoir's employment of G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy in describing, critiquing, and overcoming the mechanism of oppression and its specific impact on the historical, social, and bodily situation of women. The central thesis is that Beauvoir utilizes the Hegelian dialectic to describe how women come to be configured as mediating instruments in facilitating the relationship between freedom and nature. Hegel's dialectical method requires that opposing or con…Read more
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20Bonnie Mann. Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror (review)philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 5 (1): 161-165. 2015.
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19Personal choice and the seduction of the absolute in The MandarinsIn Sally J. Scholz & Shannon M. Mussett (eds.), The Contradictions of Freedom: Philosophical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir's the Mandarins, State University of New York Press. pp. 135--156. 2005.
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1On the Threshold of History: The Role of Nature and Africa in Hegel’s PhilosophyThe American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 3 (1): 39-46. 2003.
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661Ageing and Existentialism: Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits of FreedomIn Charles Tandy (ed.), Death and Anti-Death, Volume 4: Twenty Years After De Beauvoir, Thirty Years After Heidegger, Palo Alto: Ria University Press. 2006.
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20Beauvoir and Plato on Philosophical FictionIn Shannon M. Mussett & William S. Wilkerson (eds.), Beauvoir and Western Thought From Plato to Butler, State University of New York Press. pp. 15. 2012.
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437Irony and the Work of Art: Hegelian Legacies in Robert SmithsonEvental Aesthetics 1 (1): 45-73. 2012.This paper utilizes Robert Smithson's philosophy as a kind of counterpoint, rather than refutation, to many of Hegel's convictions on the nature and function of art in world historical spirit
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23The Literary Grounding of MetaphysicsIn Shannon M. Mussett & William S. Wilkerson (eds.), Beauvoir and Western Thought From Plato to Butler, State University of New York Press. pp. 15-33. 2012.
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40Beauvoir and Western Thought From Plato to Butler (edited book)State University of New York Press. 2012._Essays on Beauvoir’s influences, contemporary engagements, and legacy in the philosophical tradition._
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24Nature and Anti-Nature in Simone de Beauvoir’s PhilosophyPhilosophy Today 53 (Supplement): 130-137. 2009.
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3Expressions of Negativity: Simone de Beauvoir’s Response to Hegelian FreedomEssays in Celebration of the Founding of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations. 2003.
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Areas of Specialization
19th Century Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Areas of Interest
Continental Philosophy |
European Philosophy |