Current Research

My current projects focus primarily on Hegel’s theories of self-consciousness and perception, the role of art in human life, and Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of mind.

You can click here to see a video of me talking about Hegel’s critique of Schelling’s theory of intuition at a 2021 session of the Vanderbilt Modern Philosophy group. Look below for further information on recent work and works in progress.

Book Projects:

The Aesthetic Lives of Others – A project on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of literature and the problem of other minds.

Hegelian Intuitions – I propose a new way forward for mind-centered readings of Hegel’s theoretical philosophy that focuses on Hegel’s transformation of Kant’s theory of intuition. The manuscript expands on work begun in my dissertation project, “The Self-Exhibition of Reason: Hegel on Intuition and Logical Content.” The Introduction to the dissertation is available here.

Papers in Preparation:

“Disclosure and the Second Person in Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Literature” – I discuss the epistemic stakes Beauvoir’s theory of disclosure. On this basis, I argue against a recent proposal regarding the “second person” character of the knowledge we gain from reading literature and offer an alternative account of the nature of this knowledge.

“How to Acquire the World: Hegel’s Pragmatic Theory of Figurative Synthesis and Kant’s Doctrine of Right” — This paper examines the role that Kant’s Doctrine of Right account of how we come to have a priori possession of physical objects plays in the theory of empirical concept formation that Hegel lays out in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit.

“Seeing with the Eyes of Reason or, Hegelian Conceptual Amelioration” – This paper considers the extent to which Hegel’s theory of concepts is ameliorative in the sense discussed by contemporary authors such as Sally Haslanger.

“Hegel’s Two Errors Doctrine” – This paper contains an interpretive proposal about how to read Hegel in relation to Kant.

“Logical Content and the Exhibition of Conceptual Reality in Hegel’s Science of Logic”— Hegel famously rejects Kant’s claim from the Critique of Pure Reason that space and time, the Kantian forms of intuition, provide content for synthetic a priori judgments. Hegel argues instead that a priori concepts give themselves content. The mechanism by which this content is provided is poorly understood and remains a point of deep contention in the literature. Two potential sources have been defended most frequently: intellectual intuition and intuitive intellection. Here, I reject both of these and argue for a novel third option, symbolic intuition, by drawing on resources in Kant’s Critique of Judgment.