Overview
My research is unified by a set of questions about the nature and importance of individuality. On my view, individuality is a personal ideal with epistemic, practical, and aesthetic dimensions. My historical work has been preoccupied with retrieving a rich concept of individuality from Arthur Schopenhauer's ethics and theory of character, which I have used to understand his accounts of motivation, personal autonomy, and moral responsibility.
My recent work focuses on the aesthetic dimensions of individuality. With roots in early German Romanticism, I am developing an account of the individualizing power of art, or the idea that through experiencing and valuing art - listening to music, reading novels, watching movies - we become the individuals that we are. There are two facets of aesthetic individualization as I see it. First, artworks confront us in our condition as self-interpreting animals; in doing so, they can make our feelings, beliefs, and views on/about the world expressively available to us. Thus, we can be brought to understand our own minds through artistic engagement. Second, and more broadly, our aesthetic loves and attachments significantly ground our practical identities. Who we are as valuing agents is inseparable from the art we love.
I have also written on a variety of issues at the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, including the expressions of emotional pain in music (especially hardcore and emo), photographic ethics, and representations of moral character in modernist literature.