Research Statement
My research focuses on metaphysics and ethics in Kantian and 19th- & 20th-c. post-Kantian philosophy. On the one hand, I aim to understand Kant’s critique of metaphysics in its early modern context. On the other hand, I aim to comprehend the metaphysical ambitions and reinterpretations of critique that Kant provokes in 19th- & 20th-c. traditions including German idealism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and existentialism. I am also interested in the ethical concerns that inspire Kant’s critique of metaphysics and motivate post-Kantian philosophies of race and gender.
1. Current Research
1.1 First Monograph
In Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant, forthcoming with Oxford UP, I examine a question with which Kant’s science of the conditions of intelligibility leaves post-Kantian philosophers: can a science of intelligibility tolerate brute facts, in particular, brute facts about the human standpoint?
‘Facticity’ is associated with phenomenology, for which the concept denotes undeducibly brute conditions of intelligibility like temporality, sociality, and embodiment. While this suggests an affirmative answer to the post-Kantian question, scholars overlook that ‘facticity’ is a concept from German idealism, whose proponents answer the question firmly in the negative. Fichte coins ‘facticity’ to denote the intolerable contingency of brute conditions, conditions that are putatively presupposed by, and hence inexplicable limitations on, reason. A science of intelligibility must therefore eliminate putative bruteness if it is to be absolute, as Fichte says, or presuppositionless, as Hegel says. Moreover, eliminating putative bruteness requires a new logic for deriving conditions of intelligibility from reason’s own contradictions, a dialectical logic Fichte invents and Hegel develops. German idealism’s post-Kantian logical revolution subsequently provokes Heidegger’s phenomenological objection that dialectic presupposes brute conditions of the dialectician’s lived experience, conditions whose radical contingency dialectic inevitably reproduces and hence must interpret hermeneutically.
The heretofore untold history of the concept of facticity thus contains the deepest parting of the ways after Kant. On the one hand, Hegel eliminates vestigial facticity in Fichte’s system in his final step toward a presuppositionless science of intelligibility, although Schelling charges Hegel with presupposing both the value of science and the existence that science renders intelligible. On the other hand, Heidegger rejects the very idea of presuppositionlessness on behalf of a hermeneutics of facticity, an essentially open and incomplete interpretation of the conditions whereby intelligibility, including philosophical intelligibility, is possible. The trajectory from German idealism to phenomenology is accordingly one in which facticity begins as the obstacle to the science of intelligibility and ends as the character of the situation in which this science is possible in the first place. Within this trajectory, and up to our own time, reason is fated to transform from the hand that unconditionally holds the world to the thrown activity of being in the world.
By uncovering the history of the concept of facticity, its origin, transmission, and repurposing, I aim to open a dialogue between scholars of German idealism and of phenomenology. I ultimately aim to draw attention to the ways in which the post-Kantian path from dialectics toward hermeneutics forces us to reconsider Kant’s original view of brutely human facts as they bear on any account of intelligibility.
1.2 Recent and Forthcoming Articles and Edited Volumes
I have forthcoming articles on the role of Jean Paul’s neologisms ‘doppelgänger’ and ‘God is dead’ in his German romantic critique of German idealism (British Journal for the History of Philosophy) and the metametaphysics debate in 1790s German philosophy (International Journal of Philosophical Studies). I have new articles on Fichte’s doctrine of science (British Journal for the History of Philosophy) and Schelling’s doctrine of intellectual intuition (Philosophy Compass). I am now co-editing and contributing to both the Cambridge Companion to Schelling and the Cambridge Critical Guide to Schelling’s Freedom Essay. I have recently co-edited and contributed to Transformation and the History of Philosophy, a volume in Routledge’s Rewriting the History of Philosophy series on the concept of transformation from the history of Eastern and Western thought. I have also recently co-edited and contributed to a special issue of Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy on the work of Stanley Cavell. And I am currently finalizing the manuscript for a proposed co-edited volume for Oxford UP on the neo-Kantian bridge between German idealism and phenomenology.
2. Future Research
2.1 Second Monograph
In my next book, Nihilism and the Enigma of Subjectivity, I will provide the first comprehensive account of the origin, transmission, and contemporary significance of the concept of nihilism. Like ‘facticity’, ‘nihilism’ is associated with one of its inheritors: Nietzsche. Yet its use predates him by a century. Jacobi coins ‘nihilism’ in 1799 to denote the result of philosophy’s commitment to the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), viz., the denial of one’s individuality as a locus of agency and value. Abstracting from the reality of free and purposive individuals, philosophy unwittingly constructs frictionless systems of thought, which Jacobi observes in systems as disparate as Spinozism, Kantianism, and Fichteanism. Nietzsche modifies the meaning of ‘nihilism’ in the 1880s, via Turgenev, to denote the deadening of one’s own perspective on agency and value. Numb to this perspective’s affirmation of life, philosophy unwittingly perpetuates life-denying systems of meaning, particularly those which fail to take responsibility for cultural values whose ground the ‘death of God’ removes. I will demonstrate the continuity and discontinuity of Jacobi’s and Nietzsche’s accounts of nihilism, while demonstrating their respective limitations. I will then argue that we can correct our disorientation by contemporary guises of nihilism by motivating a metaphysically robust conception of subjectivity. To this end, I examine the historical, existential, embodied, and social character of subjectivity, doing so through analyses of meaning, motricity, mortality, and myth that are modelled on work by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir.
I have begun preliminary research for this book project with an article on Fichte, apperception, and the hard problem of consciousness (Parallax). There, I argue that Fichte’s conception of subjectivity as the practically apperceptive presupposition of scientific explanation provides a corrective to the nihilistic disorientation that he detects in Spinozism and that, I claim, is detectable in contemporary metaphysical responses to physicalism.
2.2 Third Monograph
My third book will provide a genealogy of the concept of self-alienation in post-Kantian philosophy. I will begin with Kant’s account of how human reason naturally obscures its own theoretical and practical laws, thereby yielding dogmatic metaphysical systems and depraved moral positions. I will then trace the post-Kantian development of this phenomenon—from Fichte’s and Hegel’s idealist accounts of the logical and ethical consequences of consciousness’s tendency to disown its role in shaping the world, to Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenological accounts of the modern individual’s evasion of its interest in and responsibility for scientific programs and social structures. I will arrive at Beauvoir’s and Fanon’s existentialist accounts of bad faith as wilful denial of one’s freedom, a form of self-effacement that perpetuates systems of oppression including patriarchy and colonialism. I will argue that existentialism offers the most comprehensive picture of the nature and extent of self-alienation, with which philosophy still must reckon.
My research focuses on metaphysics and ethics in Kantian and 19th- & 20th-c. post-Kantian philosophy. On the one hand, I aim to understand Kant’s critique of metaphysics in its early modern context. On the other hand, I aim to comprehend the metaphysical ambitions and reinterpretations of critique that Kant provokes in 19th- & 20th-c. traditions including German idealism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and existentialism. I am also interested in the ethical concerns that inspire Kant’s critique of metaphysics and motivate post-Kantian philosophies of race and gender.
1. Current Research
1.1 First Monograph
In Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant, forthcoming with Oxford UP, I examine a question with which Kant’s science of the conditions of intelligibility leaves post-Kantian philosophers: can a science of intelligibility tolerate brute facts, in particular, brute facts about the human standpoint?
‘Facticity’ is associated with phenomenology, for which the concept denotes undeducibly brute conditions of intelligibility like temporality, sociality, and embodiment. While this suggests an affirmative answer to the post-Kantian question, scholars overlook that ‘facticity’ is a concept from German idealism, whose proponents answer the question firmly in the negative. Fichte coins ‘facticity’ to denote the intolerable contingency of brute conditions, conditions that are putatively presupposed by, and hence inexplicable limitations on, reason. A science of intelligibility must therefore eliminate putative bruteness if it is to be absolute, as Fichte says, or presuppositionless, as Hegel says. Moreover, eliminating putative bruteness requires a new logic for deriving conditions of intelligibility from reason’s own contradictions, a dialectical logic Fichte invents and Hegel develops. German idealism’s post-Kantian logical revolution subsequently provokes Heidegger’s phenomenological objection that dialectic presupposes brute conditions of the dialectician’s lived experience, conditions whose radical contingency dialectic inevitably reproduces and hence must interpret hermeneutically.
The heretofore untold history of the concept of facticity thus contains the deepest parting of the ways after Kant. On the one hand, Hegel eliminates vestigial facticity in Fichte’s system in his final step toward a presuppositionless science of intelligibility, although Schelling charges Hegel with presupposing both the value of science and the existence that science renders intelligible. On the other hand, Heidegger rejects the very idea of presuppositionlessness on behalf of a hermeneutics of facticity, an essentially open and incomplete interpretation of the conditions whereby intelligibility, including philosophical intelligibility, is possible. The trajectory from German idealism to phenomenology is accordingly one in which facticity begins as the obstacle to the science of intelligibility and ends as the character of the situation in which this science is possible in the first place. Within this trajectory, and up to our own time, reason is fated to transform from the hand that unconditionally holds the world to the thrown activity of being in the world.
By uncovering the history of the concept of facticity, its origin, transmission, and repurposing, I aim to open a dialogue between scholars of German idealism and of phenomenology. I ultimately aim to draw attention to the ways in which the post-Kantian path from dialectics toward hermeneutics forces us to reconsider Kant’s original view of brutely human facts as they bear on any account of intelligibility.
1.2 Recent and Forthcoming Articles and Edited Volumes
I have forthcoming articles on the role of Jean Paul’s neologisms ‘doppelgänger’ and ‘God is dead’ in his German romantic critique of German idealism (British Journal for the History of Philosophy) and the metametaphysics debate in 1790s German philosophy (International Journal of Philosophical Studies). I have new articles on Fichte’s doctrine of science (British Journal for the History of Philosophy) and Schelling’s doctrine of intellectual intuition (Philosophy Compass). I am now co-editing and contributing to both the Cambridge Companion to Schelling and the Cambridge Critical Guide to Schelling’s Freedom Essay. I have recently co-edited and contributed to Transformation and the History of Philosophy, a volume in Routledge’s Rewriting the History of Philosophy series on the concept of transformation from the history of Eastern and Western thought. I have also recently co-edited and contributed to a special issue of Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy on the work of Stanley Cavell. And I am currently finalizing the manuscript for a proposed co-edited volume for Oxford UP on the neo-Kantian bridge between German idealism and phenomenology.
2. Future Research
2.1 Second Monograph
In my next book, Nihilism and the Enigma of Subjectivity, I will provide the first comprehensive account of the origin, transmission, and contemporary significance of the concept of nihilism. Like ‘facticity’, ‘nihilism’ is associated with one of its inheritors: Nietzsche. Yet its use predates him by a century. Jacobi coins ‘nihilism’ in 1799 to denote the result of philosophy’s commitment to the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), viz., the denial of one’s individuality as a locus of agency and value. Abstracting from the reality of free and purposive individuals, philosophy unwittingly constructs frictionless systems of thought, which Jacobi observes in systems as disparate as Spinozism, Kantianism, and Fichteanism. Nietzsche modifies the meaning of ‘nihilism’ in the 1880s, via Turgenev, to denote the deadening of one’s own perspective on agency and value. Numb to this perspective’s affirmation of life, philosophy unwittingly perpetuates life-denying systems of meaning, particularly those which fail to take responsibility for cultural values whose ground the ‘death of God’ removes. I will demonstrate the continuity and discontinuity of Jacobi’s and Nietzsche’s accounts of nihilism, while demonstrating their respective limitations. I will then argue that we can correct our disorientation by contemporary guises of nihilism by motivating a metaphysically robust conception of subjectivity. To this end, I examine the historical, existential, embodied, and social character of subjectivity, doing so through analyses of meaning, motricity, mortality, and myth that are modelled on work by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir.
I have begun preliminary research for this book project with an article on Fichte, apperception, and the hard problem of consciousness (Parallax). There, I argue that Fichte’s conception of subjectivity as the practically apperceptive presupposition of scientific explanation provides a corrective to the nihilistic disorientation that he detects in Spinozism and that, I claim, is detectable in contemporary metaphysical responses to physicalism.
2.2 Third Monograph
My third book will provide a genealogy of the concept of self-alienation in post-Kantian philosophy. I will begin with Kant’s account of how human reason naturally obscures its own theoretical and practical laws, thereby yielding dogmatic metaphysical systems and depraved moral positions. I will then trace the post-Kantian development of this phenomenon—from Fichte’s and Hegel’s idealist accounts of the logical and ethical consequences of consciousness’s tendency to disown its role in shaping the world, to Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenological accounts of the modern individual’s evasion of its interest in and responsibility for scientific programs and social structures. I will arrive at Beauvoir’s and Fanon’s existentialist accounts of bad faith as wilful denial of one’s freedom, a form of self-effacement that perpetuates systems of oppression including patriarchy and colonialism. I will argue that existentialism offers the most comprehensive picture of the nature and extent of self-alienation, with which philosophy still must reckon.
