About

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

I am a member of the philosophy faculty at Lewis University, associate to germanic studies at the University of Chicago, DAAD visiting Professor of Philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (2021) and Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung research fellow at Potsdam and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2020, 2022). Previously, I was a Bilinski Fellow and Research Visitor (VAR) in the philosophy department at Yale University, and a 2016-2017 Fulbright recipient.

I am interested in systematic conceptions of purposiveness as a normative principle in theories of self-consciousness, ethics, nature, and aesthetics. I am 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.

A complete list of publications and talks can be found on my CV and include Cambridge UP, Routledge, De Gruyter, Kant-Studien, Intellectual History Review, and the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
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).

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.