Articles
"Authenticity as Inner Freedom" forthcoming in European Journal of Philosophy.
Recent work on authenticity has aimed to rehabilitate the ideal without appealing to the metaphysically and epistemologically dubious notion of the ‘true self.’ These arguments are in part genealogical: they describe the origin of the normative pressure that generates the ideal of authenticity, and then offer an account responding to that pressure without positing a true self. Making good on a genealogy which traces the ideal of authenticity to an increased emphasis on sincere self-expression in the 18th and 19th centuries, Charles Taylor (1989) and Rahel Jaeggi (2016) offer accounts of authenticity as an expressivist ideal. I propose an alternative deliberative genealogy, on which authenticity arises alongside an increase in the freedom to choose one’s own projects around the same period. This generates a requirement that expressivist accounts cannot meet: someone who is authentic is justified in thinking that she is living as she should. I argue for a novel account of authenticity without a true self, which meets the requirement of the deliberative ideal. Authenticity is a distinctive kind of positive freedom, which is achieved by taking responsibility for ongoing interpretation of the task that living a life seems to present and of the possibilities available within it.
"Heidegger on Anxiety and Normative Practice, " Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 12: 31.
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.
A review of Tamar Schapiro's Feeling Like It (OUP 2021), in the Journal of Moral Philosophy.
Dissertation
Anxiety and the Practical Point of View
Dissertation committee: Jonathan Lear (chair), Candace Vogler, Matthew Boyle
What is the starting point for our thinking about how to live? For metaethical constructivists, who ground normative facts in the practical point of view of a deliberating agent, practical thinking begins from commitments we already endorse as sources of good reasons for action. I argue that this begins too late. We can, and often do, ask how to live from a position of not yet knowing, which existentialist philosophers analyze as anxiety. My dissertation offers a novel version of post-Kantian constructivism, based in new interpretations of discussions of anxiety by Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Freud. The resulting account of our agency gives non-deliberative forms of creative, interpretative practical thinking a central role.
Book Projects
Anxious Subjects: On not knowing how to live (in progress). This book will take anxiety as a starting point for an account of autonomous agency which emphasizes that our self-consciousness as agents involves self-awareness of our finitude, as well as our rationality. We each live only one life, which means that in any situation, we cannot do everything that there is reason to do; so, we face the question which worthwhile projects to undertake and require a principle to decide. Anxiety describes a confrontation with this dimension of our finitude. Anxious Subjects argues that the practical point of view of finite human agents is characterized fundamentally by anxiety and shows how this transforms our understanding of other dimensions of human finitude, including desire, immaturity, error, and unconsciousness in mental life. Recognizing this forms the basis for a novel version of post-Kantian constructivism, which takes Kierkegaard and Heidegger as inspiration rather than German Idealism. Along the way, the book develops a new interpretation of anxiety in the history of philosophy and offers an account of the relation between psychoanalysis and philosophical ethics, with anxiety positioned as a shared concept between them. This project aims to capture an overlooked dimension of the significance that the open-endedness of human agency, e.g., that we do not have a good given by the nature of the species, has in our lives.
Heidegger on Anxiety (under contract), in the Cambridge Elements series on Heidegger, edited by Filippo Casati and Daniel Dahlstrom.
What is the relation between an individual human agent and the norm-governed practices of her community? How does this question relate to metaethical questions about the “sources” of normativity? This short monograph will offer an interpretation of Heidegger’s discussion of anxiety and related concepts in Being and Time which answers these questions. By rethinking the phenomenology of anxiety, this volume responds to charges of irrationalism on Heidegger’s behalf and argues that he offers a more expansive conception of human rationality than traditional pictures. Against readings that interpret anxiety as an experience in which all of the possibilities available to Dasein show up as worthless, I suggest instead that they show up as enigmatic. Dasein recognizes, in anxiety, that there is something that it is doing by doing everything else it does, namely, projecting itself onto possibilities or Being-in-the-world. Interpretation is required to understand the various possibilities in its world as ways of doing that. In this way, anxiety is an occasion for Dasein to take responsibility for its own understanding of what public normativity has made intelligible. The approach taken in this volume will reveal continuity with earlier discussions of anxiety by Kant and Kierkegaard, and suggest interpretations of other key concepts, like death, guilt, resoluteness and authenticity.
Work in Progress (drafts available by request)
On constructivist strategies for grounding normativity
On "first-personal" methods in psychoanalytic theorizing
On Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety
On epistemic and zetetic norms