Faculty Member, Philosophy
Visiting Instructor (Full Time)
About
In May 2010 I took a PhD from Duquesne University with a dissertation entitled 'Sensation Rebuilt: Corporeal Ontology in Levinas and Merleau-Ponty' (Director: Fred Evans / Committee: Silvia Benso, Dan Selcer, George Yancy)
Lately I've been working in French phenomenology, although my interests are, in a sense, not properly phenomenological. Instead, I'm concerned with the metaphysics of sensation, affect, embodiment, and identity--in sum, the materiality of aesthetics--at play in phenomenology, as well as the criticism of that metaphysics from the standpoints of realism and materialism. This concern bears on the question of how humans fit into their environment and, conversely, how that environment fits into them.
At the moment I am writing a second book that examines the metaphysical and methodological commitments of phenomenology, arguing that phenomenology is incompatible with realism. It's called 'The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism'.
For the foreseeable future I am developing/using the concept of plasticity to describe bodily identity and the relationship between bodies and sensory environments. I am preparing for publication a book entitled "Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology," and I am also producing a coedited volume with Adam Hutchinson on the myriad ways that habit and habituation have been mobilized in the history of philosophy. Some long term projects are on the horizon: (1) an examination of Jacques Ranciere, the sensible, and inequality; (2) a study of 'Spinozist aesthetics'; (3) a book on the substitution of aesthetic expression for moral judgment in the work of Spinoza, Hume, and Nietzsche; (4) a radical rethinking of animation, vitality, and agency as ecological effects, along with the biopolitical consequences of this rethinking.
Fall 2011 Courses: Introduction to Logic, Medical Ethics, Introduction to Philosophy
Spring 2012 Courses: Medical Ethics, American Philosophy
