•  3
    This book is an attempt to write about Kierkegaard's philosophy in the style of Kierkegaard's philosophy: energetic, playful, free spirited, surprising, and joyous. It is a deliberately crumby book in the sense that it seeks out the fragments, scraps, and crumbs of philosophical arguments that are generally ignored or swept away, like so much rubbish, but that are actually the most interesting parts of the meal. The Anti-Assistant-Professor Method that this book follows adopts Kierkegaard's many…Read more
  •  8
    Three forms of philosophical theatre in Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 48 (1): 86-127. 2022.
    I argue that Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks deserve to be read as works of philosophy and not just used as supplements to bring order and respectability to Kierkegaard’s other writings. There are at least three specific philosophical values in Kierkegaard’s journals – three ways in which the journals create philosophy within their own pages and therefore deserve to be read as independent works of philosophy and not just as supplements to Kierkegaard’s other writing: (1) The journals demons…Read more
  •  8
    In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche explores the nature of teaching and learning and concludes that a teacher can do more harm than good in a student's life if she allows her students to become her ‘disciples’. A disciple assigns too much authority to a teacher and thus loses the ability to think independently; this is what Zarathustra means when he warns his students, ‘Beware that you are not killed by a statue!’ In this article I argue that Zarathustra's solution to this problem is to undermin…Read more
  •  3
    A review of volume 11, part 1 of _Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks._
  •  22
    I argue for an approach to Philosophical Fragments that allows it to be philosophical and fragmentary, and that pays particular attention to the fragments, or crumbs, that seem least important. One such overlooked crumb is the theory of merely human education in the book—education that does not enlist God as the teacher, where humans simply try to teach and learn from each other. I argue that Philosophical Fragments defends this theory of education with several reductio ad absurdum proofs that a…Read more
  •  9
    From Eyesight to Insight
    Philosophy Today 61 (3): 633-653. 2017.
    Descartes’s work as a philosopher was inspired by three dreams he had on November 10, 1619, and yet the philosophy that Descartes produced in response to this inspiration included an argument that all dreams are deceptive. This particular incongruity is indicative of a more general ambivalence and anxiety in Descartes’s thought concerning images, which creates a tension that is never fully resolved. In this essay I focus primarily on one side of that tension: the part of Descartes’s philosophy t…Read more
  •  5
    From Eyesight to Insight
    Philosophy Today 61 (3): 633-653. 2017.
    Descartes’s work as a philosopher was inspired by three dreams he had on November 10, 1619, and yet the philosophy that Descartes produced in response to this inspiration included an argument that all dreams are deceptive. This particular incongruity is indicative of a more general ambivalence and anxiety in Descartes’s thought concerning images, which creates a tension that is never fully resolved. In this essay I focus primarily on one side of that tension: the part of Descartes’s philosophy t…Read more
  • Non-Cognitive Ethics in Levinas and Kant
    Dissertation, Emory University. 1997.
    In this dissertation I outline a theory of non-cognitive ethics--a theory of how ethics is possible in response to feeling rather than to concepts--that is drawn from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the aesthetic thought of Immanuel Kant. In general I argue that in the work of Levinas we can find a description of non-cognitive ethics in which community and subjectivity are still meaningful, and that Kant's third Critique can contribute to this project by providing some of the tran…Read more
  •  47
    In an interview with Philippe Nemo, Emmanuel Levinas makes a very revealing comment about what he was trying to accomplish in his ethical philosophy. In response to a question about the ‘starting-point’ of his ethics, Levinas protests: ‘My task does not consist in constructing ethics; I only try to find its meaning … One can without doubt construct an ethics in function of what I have just said [in describing his philosophy up to this point in the interview], but this is not my own theme’
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    Unity and Undecidability
    Philosophy in the Contemporary World 5 (4): 25-32. 1998.
    This essay argues that, in the first Critique, the need for unity leads Kant to re-inscribe the subject in a situation of multiplicity and undecidability. The result, however, is not a relativization that negates the meaning of the subject’s existence, but rather a contextualization that makes meaning possible. This reading clarifies some of the connections between Kant and contemporary postmodernism, especially the work of Jacques Derrida.
  • Philip Fisher, Wonder, The Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences Reviewed by (review)
    Philosophy in Review 24 (6): 410-411. 2004.
  •  6
    Johannes Climacus as Kierkegaard’s Discourse on Method
    Philosophy Today 47 (4): 360-377. 2003.
  •  5
    How to Avoid Writing: Prefaces and Points of View in Kierkeggard
    Philosophy Today 44 (2): 123-136. 2000.
  •  103
    Subjectivity and orientation in Levinas and Kant
    Continental Philosophy Review 32 (4): 433-449. 1999.
    This essay presents an argument for reconceptualizing subjectivity as orientational rather than foundational in nature. My focus is on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Immanuel Kant. I begin by summarizing Levinas''s theory of ethical subjectivity as a theory of the self where the internal and the external are in constant play. Then I turn to two works of Kant for resources to understand better the meaning of Levinas''s theory of the self. In "What is Orientation in Thinking?" Kant presents a mo…Read more