About

PROFESSIONAL: I work on teleology (mereology of purposiveness) in aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, with historical emphasis on Kant and Hegel.

I am an AvH Fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lewis University, and temporary Associate to Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. I was a DAAD visiting Professor of Philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (2021), Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung research fellow at Potsdam (2020), a Bilinski Fellow and Research Visitor (VAR) in the philosophy department at Yale University (2017-2018), and 2016-2017 Fulbright recipient.

I am interested in systematic conceptions of purposiveness (teleology) as a normative principle in theories of self-consciousness, ethics, nature, and aesthetics. I am broadly interested in the effects of systematic notions of becoming and formation from Heraclitus and Aristotle through Kant, Hegel, and Goethe to Gadamer, Cassirer, Kuhn, and Philippa Foot, to contemporary debates in philosophy. I am also interested in comparative ethics and normative theories that manage to be both universal and developmental, and theories of time and identity, scientific paradigms, and the formative value of the fine arts for self-consciousness and society. Within applied ethics, I am interested in theories of kind-derived norms that can account for universal rights and unique responsibility relative to the kind in question. I am also interested in the application of theories of identity and ethics to emergent forms of artificial intelligence; and the conditions of intelligibility for all possible, even non-human forms of self-consciousness.

Select Publications:
"Hegel's End of Art and Artworks as Internally Purposive Wholes" Journal of the History of Philosophy (forthcoming 2022).
"Pure Synthesis and the Principle of the Synthetic Unity of Apperception" Kant-Studien 113, no. 1 (forthcoming 2022).
"Artworks are Valuable for their own Sake" Journal of the American Philosophical Association (forthcoming 2022).
“The Concept of Life in German Idealism and its Aristotelian Roots” Intellectual History Review 31, no. 3 (2021): 379-390.
“Goethe’s Theory of Art: Rethinking Organic Wholes and Architecture” in History of Modern Aesthetics, edited by Colleen Coalter, Bloomsbury (forthcoming 2022).
“The Ground of Hegel’s Logic of Life and the Unity of Reason: The Free Lawfulness of the Imagination” The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism. Ed. Gerad Gentry and Konstantin Pollok. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2019).

My professional service includes serving as a member of the American Philosophical Association program committee ('20-21), editorial board member of the Yale Law School's Journal of law and the Humanities (17-18); and founding president of the Society for German Idealism and Romanticism (www.thesgir.org).

PERSONAL: I love time with my spouse and kids, particularly in nature and in diverse cultures globally. Activities include tennis, soccer, sprint-triathlons, pottery, photography, sculpting, and cross-country skiing. I love literature, from the novels of Dostoevsky to the poems of T.S. Eliot; from the short stories of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to the epic myths of J.R.R. Tolkien.