Articles
"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)
A paper on authenticity (R&R)
“What is the human plight?” Christine Korsgaard (1996; 2009) begins her influential argument for Kantian constructivism from the “human plight”: that we are “condemned to choice and action” (2009: 1). She vindicates normative objectivity and authority as a solution to this problem: we need reasons in order to act. I identify a tension in Korsgaard's presentation of the “human plight”: on the one hand, normativity is grounded in the practical point of view, so characterized; on the other hand, the view entails that this it is not a problem we ever face. This means that normativity is grounded in an agent’s answer to a question, for which there is no answer by constructivism’s lights: the question which way of living to appropriate as her own and endorse as a source of reasons for action. I argue that this tension should lead us to seek an alternative analysis of the “human plight” as anxiety, a concept drawn from post-Kantian philosophy. My proposal suggests a new, Kierkegaardian or Heideggerian direction for post-Kantian constructivism.
“Kantian Methods in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis” The “Kantian method” in the philosophy of action describes the activity of an agent from the “participant standpoint,” the perspective of the one engaging in the activity (Schapiro 2021). I identify a parallel first-person methodology in Freud’s psychoanalytic theorizing: he imaginatively inhabits the perspective of the ego and describes the pressures it is subject to and how it responds. To develop this suggestion, I take Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety as a case study. Freud’s revision of his earlier account of anxiety turns on the introduction of a psychoanalytic “participant standpoint”: it reflects a shift from thinking of psychic activity as processes happening in me, to things that I (das Ich) am doing. Recognizing this suggests significant continuity between philosophical and psychoanalytic conceptions of the person.
“Finitude as Interpretive Dependence in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety” In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard offers an reading of the biblical story of the Fall which is aimed at explaining the possibility of original sin without presupposing “knowledge of good and evil.” I suggest Kierkegaard takes up this theological problem to address another: on a Kantian picture of agency, how can an agent determine herself to act under a principle for the first time? His solution identifies an overlooked dimension of our finitude: our dependence on language and shared cultural practice for the intelligibility of anything we might do. Anxiety is the self-awareness of this dependence. It has an affective dimension because it also involves dependence on other people. In childhood, while we do not know the meaning of what we might do, adults do; in adulthood, the significance of our actions remains vulnerable to others’ interpretation. This reading of anxiety as self-awareness of interpretative dependence illuminates the connection between anxiety and authenticity for Kierkegaard and later for Heidegger.
“Whether and Which” Recent work by Jane Friedman (2020) has argued that epistemic norms, which govern knowledge and belief, and zetetic norms, which govern inquiry, are in tension. She suggests that this tension motivates a “zetetic turn,” which reorients epistemology around norms governing inquiry. I propose a different approach, which understands the tension between epistemic and zetetic norms analogously with a related issue in practical reasoning. Philosophers often articulate the connection between rationality and self-consciousness by characterizing self-consciousness as the capacity to ask a certain kind of question: “whether p?” or “whether to ϕ?” I argue that this overlooks a second kind of question that we face insofar as we are self-conscious: on the practical side, the question which, e.g., of ϕ or ψ, to do, and on the theoretical side, the question which topic to inquire into. I suggest that the tension between epistemic and zetetic normativity is one aspect of a general problem of accounting for the way that our finitude shapes self-consciousness of theoretical and practical reason and so our understanding of the norms that govern them.