Research

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Most of my research is in historicist political philosophy and is motivated by two interconnected questions. How is normative content historically generated? And what secures the normative force of historically and socially variable political norms? Put differently, how should we explain how the norms that structure our practical and political lives came to have the content that they have? And what should our justifications and critiques of political practices and norms look like? The figures that I draw on to try to answer these questions hold in common the view that approaching political philosophy from the perspective that we call "ideal theory" gets something importantly wrong. Instead of constructing a theory of an ideal society that serves as a normative standard for our actual society, we should draw our standards of justification and critique from our actual social and political practices and their histories. Overall, my aim is to answer these questions both through analyses of historical figures, especially Hegel, Foucault, Wynter, and Heidegger, and on independent grounds. I have approached them in my dissertation, Historicist Politics: Hegel and Foucault on Normativity and the Modal Constitution of History, and in a number of articles that I am preparing for publication. I have presented early versions of those articles at SPEP, The Heidegger Circle, the Caribbean Philosophical Association, and a departmental symposium at The University of Memphis. (More details about them can be found below.)

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I also have interests in ontology and metaphysics, especially in Hegel and Heidegger. Some of my work in this area is on Hegel's modal metaphysics and overlaps with my work in historicist political philosophy. And some of it is concerned with Heidegger's critique of Hegel, and has appeared in Epoché. 

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Published Work:

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• (2024) "Grounds and First Principles in Heidegger and Hegel" Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy. 28(2)

  • Abstract: In this article, I provide an interpretation of Heidegger’s critique of Hegel. Hegel’s ability to provide a presuppositionless metaphysics is often taken to be the core strength of his Logic. In his critique of Hegel, Heidegger attempts to show that Hegel in fact smuggles in a decisive presupposition concerning being. Building on the recent work of Robert Pippin, I argue that we can understand this critique by situating it in terms of their common understanding of problems of first principles. Once we do, we can fully appreciate a point that Pippin misses, that Heidegger develops his methodology and concept of ground in order to avoid the problems that he locates in Hegel. The upshots of my interpretation are that it (1) allows us to appreciate the systematicity and radicality of Heidegger’s mature ontology, and (2) forces those sympathetic to Hegel to reevaluate Hegel’s ability to provide a presuppositionless metaphysics.​

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Works in Progress:

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• "The Method and Aims of Wynter's Humanism" (draft available upon request)

  • Abstract: In this article, I argue (1) that Wynter distinguishes between the context-independent laws of the “autopoetic” institution of human genres and the context-dependent symbols for humanity and inhumanity, and (2) that that a core goal of Wynter’s humanism is to provide an account of the former. Interpreters of Wynter typically ignore and deny the former dimension of her work and are therefore not in a position to appreciate the resources that Wynter offers for providing an account of dehumanization. My article aims to rectify this issue and to demonstrate the contemporary importance of Wynter’s humanism.​

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• "Hegel's Modal Expressivism from Logic to History" (draft available upon request)

  • Abstract: Hegel’s seeming denial of historical contingency, and affirmation of historical necessity history, are among the least popular views expressed in his work. Partially in response to this fact, over the last few decades, Hegel scholars have increasingly emphasized the theoretically central role that contingency plays in Hegel’s work. Although a number of these scholars have laudably analyzed the connections between Hegel’s official theory of these modal categories, found in the Science of Logic, and Hegel’s views on history, the literature still suffers from an inadequate account of Hegel’s modal theory. In particular, the literature has, to date, failed to sufficiently account for Hegel’s expressivism about modality. In this article, I provide an account of Hegel’s modal expressivism and discuss the constraints it places on interpretations of his uses of modal categories in his philosophy of history.​

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• "Self-Consciousness, Jemeinigkeit, and Practical Normativity in Being and Time" (draft available upon request)

  • ​Abstract: Scholars have argued that in the period around Being and Time Heidegger presents a theory of normativity as grounded in self-consciousness. This paper provides a new interpretation of the central elements of that theory. I argue that Heidegger’s distinctive contribution to normativity theory is to (1) distinguish between authentic and inauthentic ways of acting in light of norms, and (2) to claim that inauthentically acting in light of norms is possible only because it is possible to authentically act in light of norms. For Heidegger, normative content is generated by the socially and historically variable social mass that he calls "das Mann", and normative force is enabled by the possibility of Dasein's authenticity. I conclude by raising two critical questions about Heidegger’s theory.

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• "Contingency, Power, and Knowledge in Foucault's Genealogy"

  • Abstract and draft available soon!​

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