Research

My research is in practical philosophy, and investigates our thinking, from the first-person perspective, about how to live. I am especially interested in the way that our responsibility not only for our choices and actions, but for determining a conception of the good at which to aim, suggests that we should think more expansively than familiar, deliberative conceptions of practical reasoning to include creative and interpretative forms of practical thinking.  I also have a longstanding interest in the history of philosophy, focusing on Kant and post-Kantian philosophy. My work is informed by and engages with conceptions of human subjectivity that are characteristic of these traditions as well as psychoanalysis.

Dissertation: Anxiety and the Practical Point of View

Dissertation committee: Jonathan Lear (chair), Candace Vogler, Matthew Boyle 

In our inquiry into how to live our lives, we ask questions not only about what to do on particular occasions, but also about how on the whole we should live: questions about what our lives require of us and what would make them worth living.  Standard philosophical efforts to account for these reflections are unsatisfactory because they do not adequately distinguish them from skeptical challenges to the existence of normativity. Constructivism offers fruitful analysis of related concerns, but this kind of account reaches its limits in explaining our reflection on our projects as a whole. My dissertation identifies a distinctive context in which such questions can arise: in an experience of anxiety, understood along the lines of a certain strand of existentialist thought. Anxiety is an occasion for thinking about how you should live, when you do not know what it would mean to live your life as you should. I argue that the limited ability of standard pictures of deliberation to account for this perspective shows that practical thinking is also creative and interpretative. My dissertation argues for an account of our agency that gives non-deliberative forms of practical thinking a central role. 

Publications

"Heidegger on Anxiety and Normative Practice" (forthcoming in Ergo; penultimate draft available here.) 

I offer a new interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety in Being and Time as an account of the relationship between individual agents and the public normative practices of their communities. According to a prominent recent interpretation, Heidegger’s discussions of anxiety, death and the “call of conscience” together explain how we can respond to the norms of our practices as reasons and subject them to critical reflection.  I argue that this is only part of the story.  Anxiety is an occasion for Dasein to take responsibility for its ongoing activity of interpreting the possibilities for living and acting made available by the normative practices of its community, which is presupposed and overlooked from the perspective of everyday Dasein. Public normativity underdetermines Dasein’s conception of what it would mean to take up any of the possibilities available in its world as a way of living its own life. 

Work in Progress (drafts available upon request) 

A paper on metaethcial constructivism (title redacted for peer review) 

"Practical Self-Interpretation" (on Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and the foundations of normativity)

"The 'anxious possibility of being able' and the 'enigmatic word': Seeking a theory of agency in Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety"

Book Reviews

A review of Tamar Schapiro's Feeling Like It (OUP 2021), forthcoming in the Journal of Moral Philosophy