•  155
    Ecological Risk: Climate Change as Abstract-Corporeal Problem
    Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Sobre Cuerpos, Emociones y Sociedad 10 (28): 88-97. 2018.
    This essay uses Ulrich Beck’s concept of risk society to understand the threat of catastrophic climate change. It argues that this threat is “abstract-corporeal”, and therefore a special kind of threat that poses special kinds of epistemic and ecological challenges. At the center of these challenges is the problem of human vulnerability, which entails a complex form of trust that both sustains and threatens human survival.
  •  82
    A History of Habit: From Aristotle to Bourdieu (edited book)
    with Adam Hutchinson
    Lexington Books. 2013.
    The essays collected here demonstrate that the philosophy of habit is not confined to the work of just a handful of thinkers, but traverses the entire history of Western philosophy and continues to thrive in contemporary theory. A History of Habit: From Aristotle to Bourdieu is the first book to document the richness and diversity of this history. It demonstrates the breadth, flexibility, and explanatory power of the concept of habit as well as its enduring significance. It makes the case for ha…Read more
  •  60
    Plasticity and Aesthetic Identity; or, Why We Need a Spinozist Aesthetics
    Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 22 (40-41): 53-74. 2011.
    This essay defends the view that, as embodied, our identities are necessarily dependent on the aesthetic environment. Toward this end, it examines the renewal of the concept of sensation (aisthesis) in phenomenology, but then concludes that the methodology and metaphysics of phenomenology must be abandoned in favor of an ontology that sees corporeal identity as generated by the materiality of aesthetic relations. It is suggested that such an ontology is available in the work of Spinoza, which he…Read more
  •  58
    Some Ways to Speculative Aesthetics
    Philosophy Today 61 (3): 523-38. 2017.
    Continental philosophy is witnessing a global renaissance of speculative philosophy. And while some corners of this movement are gaining traction in art- and architecture-theoretical circles, its application to philosophical aesthetics has been forestalled in favor of metaphysical and, secondarily, epistemological inquiry. This essay tracks some of the ways that speculative aesthetics is emerging, and opening new pathways, within the renaissance. It accomplishes three primary tasks. First, it en…Read more
  •  54
    A Physiology of Encounters
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 15 (1): 165-186. 2010.
    The body is central to the philosophies of Spinoza and Nietzsche. Both thinkers are concerned with the composition of the body, its potential relations with other bodies, and the modifications which a body can undergo. Gilles Deleuze has contributed significantly to the relatively sparse literature which draws out the affinities between Spinoza and Nietzsche. Deleuze’s reconceptualization of the field of ethology enables us to bring Spinoza and Nietzsche together as ethologists of the body and t…Read more
  •  54
    Disabled Bodies and Norms of Flourishing in the Human Engineering Debate
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 11 (2): 36-62. 2018.
    In this paper, I argue that Jonathan Glover, a prominent advocate of human genetic engineering, relies on a limited naturalistic account of normal human function in his defense of genetic engineering as a means of decreasing future instances of disability. I show that his concept of disability and the normative argument informed by it in his Choosing Children: Genes, Disability, and Design fails to incorporate the phenomenological dimension of embodiment, and that this dimension should be includ…Read more
  •  53
    True Detective and Philosophy (edited book)
    with Jacob Graham
    Wiley. 2017.
    Investigating the trail of philosophical leads in HBO’s chilling True Detective series, an elite team of philosophers examine far-reaching riddles including human pessimism, Rust’s anti-natalism, the problem of evil, and the ‘flat circle’.
  •  52
    Ecological Trust: An Object-Oriented Perspective
    Philosophy Today 61 (1): 99-115. 2017.
    This essay conceives ecological life as radically dependent, vulnerable, and horrific. Epistemologically speaking, we are quite ignorant of the web of dependency that sustains our lives. Our ecological condition often prevents us from locating and identifying our dependencies and the many ways our actions impact the environment. This is the terror and danger that plagues the Anthropocene. Our ignorance bears an ontological weight that can be drawn out with the concept of trust. Trust, I argue, i…Read more
  •  34
    Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1. 2015.
    Review of Markus Gabriel, Fields of Sense, Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
  •  33
    Speculative Realism: An Introduction (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1. 2019.
    Review of Graham Harman, Speculative Realism: An Introduction, Polity, 2018.
  •  32
    Sensation is a concept with a conflicted philosophical history. It has found as many allies as enemies in nearly every camp from empiricism to poststructuralism. Polyvalent, with an uncertain referent, and often overshadowed by intuition, perception, or cognition, sensation invites as much metaphysical speculation as it does dismissive criticism. The promise of sensation has certainly not been lost on the phenomenologists who have sought to ‘rehabilitate’ the concept. In Plastic Bodies, Tom Spar…Read more
  •  28
    Levinas's Philosophy of Time (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (-): -. 2013.
  •  28
    Alphonso Lingis is the author of many books and renowned for his translations of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Klossowski. By combining a rich philosophical training with an extensive travel itinerary, Lingis has developed a distinctive brand of phenomenology that is only now beginning to gain critical attention. Lingis inhabits a ready-made language and conceptuality, but cultivates a style of thinking which disrupts and transforms the work of his predecessors, setting him apart from the rest of …Read more
  •  22
    The Political Life of Sensation (review)
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19 (1): 132-138. 2011.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  22
    Tom Sparrow shows how, in the 21st century, speculative realism aims to do what phenomenology could not: provide a philosophical method that disengages the human-centred approach to metaphysics in order to chronicle the complex realm of nonhuman reality. Through a focused reading of the methodological statements and metaphysical commitments of key phenomenologists and speculative realists, Sparrow shows how speculative realism is replacing phenomenology as the beacon of realism in contemporary C…Read more
  •  21
    Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis (edited book)
    with Bobby George
    Punctum Books. 2014.
    Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis gathers a diverse collection of texts on Lingis’s life and philosophy, including poetry, original interviews, essays, book reviews, and a photo essay. It also includes an unpublished piece by Lingis, “Doubles,” along with copies of several of his letters to a friend.
  •  18
    Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis
    Perspectives: International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy 2 (1): 116-139. 2009.
    Alphonso Lingis is the author of many books and renowned for his translations of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Klossowski. By combining a rich philosophical training with an extensive travel itinerary, Lingis has developed a distinctive brand of phenomenology that is only now beginning to gain critical attention. Lingis inhabits a ready-made language and conceptuality, but cultivates a style of thinking which disrupts and transforms the work of his predecessors, setting him apart from the rest of …Read more
  •  14
    Levinas's Philosophy of Time (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2013 (1): 1. 2013.
  •  13
    The Alphonso Lingis Reader
    University of Minnesota Press. 2018.
    Alphonso Lingis is arguably the most intriguing American philosopher of the past fifty years. An extended encounter with the singular philosopher, The Alphonso Lingis Reader conducts us through Lingis’s early writing on phenomenology to his hybrid studies fusing philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, communication theory, aesthetics, and other disciplines, to his original, inspired arguments about everything from knowledge to laughter to death.
  •  12
    Levinas Unhinged
    Zero Books. 2013.
    Through six heterodox essays this book extracts a materialist account of subjectivity and aesthetics from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. More than a work of academic commentary that would leave many of Levinas’s pious commentators aghast, Sparrow exhibits an aspect of Levinas which is darker, yet no less fundamental, than his ethical and theological guises. This darkened Levinas provides answers to problems in aesthetics, speculative philosophy, ecology, ethics, and philosophy of race, prob…Read more