Current Research

My research focuses on questions of methodology, ontology, and the limits of expression in Kant and post-Kantian philosophy. I am interested in the way that this strand of philosophy challenges, and is challenged by, contemporary approaches and positions. On the one hand, this involves scholarship in the history of philosophy focusing on traditions that stem from Kant, including German Idealism and Romanticism, Neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, existentialism, and critical theory. On the other, it involves the clarification and development of philosophical methods and positions from these post-Kantian traditions so that we can better assess the extent to which they can sustain contemporary scrutiny.
 
I am currently developing several research projects, and editing a multi-author volume for submission to Oxford University Press.
 
My most recent draft is titled, “Merleau-Ponty’s Descartes: The Philosopher in Factical Situation” which compares Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Cézanne to his interpretation of Descartes. In “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty situates Cézanne’s paintings in Cézanne’s life, interpreting them in a way that foregrounds not just his artistic products and his statements about them, his influences, and his private thoughts and experiences, but the interplay of the facticity and freedom of the painter in his confrontation with his embodied, historical situation. Likewise, Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Descartes provides an illustration of the way that the philosopher is confronted in their philosophical work by their factical situation. Merleau-Ponty’s commentary on Descartes provides insight into his conception of phenomenology as a method, the significance of facticity for philosophical reflection, and the nature and grounds of philosophers’ appeals to universality. Merleau-Ponty enlists Descartes as exemplar, and (at times) unwitting herald, of the philosopher’s facticity.
 
“Death and Apperception” begins from the thought that only two things are certain in life: death and apperception. For Heidegger, and for Kant, respectively, death and transcendental apperception are necessary to our finite mode of being. Like Kant, Heidegger is motivated by a concern for systematic understanding of our finite mode of being; like Kant, he aims to map out the space of meaning in which we live through an understanding of its limits. Kant limits and defines the totality of our possible cognitions through the form given by the unity of transcendental apperception. Heidegger limits and defines the totality of Dasein’s possibilities-to-be through its ‘ownmost’ possibility, which makes it a whole: its death. I offer a novel reading of the concept of death in Heidegger which draws out these parallels with Kant, and foregrounds the systematic, validating role of authentic being-towards-death in enabling our self-determination.
 
“Time Will Tell” examines the role of temporality in constituting both the subjectivity of subjects and the objectivity of objects. Kant and the phenomenologists tie subjectivity very closely to temporality, with Merleau-Ponty saying, at one point in Phénoménologie de la perception, “I myself am time.” Drawing on works by Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir, I argue that rather than expressing a strongly subjectivist ontology, understanding temporality as a constitutive ontological principle tells us what objectivity amounts to: with respect to the reality of subjects just as much as objects, only time will tell.
 
In “Architectonic Drift” I compare Ernst Cassirer’s conception of system with Kant’s and with Hegel’s. For Cassirer, the symbolic forms that make up human culture constitute a system because our diverse ways of meaning-making are all ultimately oriented towards a single end: the realization of human freedom. Breaking with his predecessors, however, Cassirer does not think that this end-directedness implies that the system of symbolic forms follows a fixed course of development along a fixed set of branches. I explain why, according to Cassirer, human culture remains in a perpetual state of ‘architectonic drift’—a dynamism in which the unity of the system is maintained through the spontaneous mutation and mutual accommodation of basic meaning-making functions, giving rise to a plurality of concrete symbolic forms in historically contingent configurations.

“Teaching Writing in the Age of Mechanical Content Production” is a pedagogical reflection on how we teach writing in an age when Large Langage Models can produce coherent, grammatical content on demand. This has implications for the writing tasks we assign our students, and the type of instruction they require in preparing to write. Alexandra Gustafson (Toronto) and using these pedagogical issues to think through the very point of writing assignments, and what we hope to teach using them.

I am also in the process of collecting and editing author submissions for an edited volume titled From Jena to Freiburg: Bridging Post-Kantian Philosophical Traditions. Our volume aims to trace the trajectory of post-Kantian thought, focusing on underexplored historical and conceptual connections between German Idealism, German Romanticism, Neo-Kantianism, and phenomenology. English-speaking scholarship has most often approached these post-Kantian traditions separately (with the occasional exception of studies examining them in pairs). My co-editors are Nicholas F. Stang (Toronto) and G. Anthony Bruno (Royal Holloway). Our hope is that bringing together distinguished scholars of these narrower post-Kantian traditions with an invitation to view things through a wider historical lens will produce new insights and new readings of the philosophical issues and problematics facing post-Kantian philosophy.