Research interest:
My broad research interest is in the possibility of a post-Hegelian, post-metaphysical philosophizing as a thinking whose 'subject matter' (Sache) is the sense of experience as a whole (over and above, the cognitive attempt to establish universal objective truths), animated by a love of wisdom as a wisdom of love. This interest is premised on the assumption that philosophy understood as a love of wisdom that would come to fulfillment in absolute self-knowing knowing does indeed come to such fulfillment in Hegel's system in which the identity of reason and reality, heaven and earth, is presumed to be demonstrated absolutely. Thus, philosophically, I think that one is either an Hegelian, and so accepts that the goal of philosophy is "the actual knowing of what is in truth" in a system of absolute knowledge as accomplished in Hegel's thought, or one in effect assumes, whether wittingly or not, some post-Hegelian stance whereby the 'sense' of philosophy itself is limited or transformed. The issue that concerns me, then, is whether, if the traditional goal of absolute knowledge is not definitive for philosophy as such, can one still speak without embarrassment or irony of philosophy as the love of wisdom, and what would such talk mean for the reconfiguration of philosophy itself. As Peter Sloterdijk has remarked, "No one talks anymore of the love of wisdom. There is no longer any knowledge whose friend (philia) one could be." As a consequence, he observes, most current philosophizing eschews such talk in order "to intervene in the game of power," where the minimal goal is "not to be duped." In this circumstance, my research and my pedagogical interest is to revive talk of the love of wisdom as a wisdom of love in the context of a genuinely finite philosophy whose terminus a quo et ad quem is experience. Notwithstanding my youthful debt to Heidegger, and obvious resonances of this interest with the Kierkegaard-Rosenzweig-Buber-Levinas tradition, my chief hero in this revival is Kant.
Most recent publication:
"Recalling Arendt on Thinking," in Action and Appearance: Ethics and the Politics of Writing in Hannah Arendt, eds. Anna Yeatman, Phillip Hansen, Magdalena Zolkos & Charles Barbour, New York: Continuum, 2011, pp. 10-24.