CURRENT WORK (drafts available upon request):

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Book Project

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Marilynne Robinson's Worldly Gospel: A Philosophical Account (contracted with Bloomsbury Academic; manuscript due May 2021; co-authored with Ryan Kemp)

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In her four novels and many essays, Marilynne Robinson develops a distinctive Christian vision, whose power rests in large part in its promotion of a thoroughly affirmative and sacramental attitude toward the physical world and the human lives that develop therein. Her work is thus a compelling response to the claim, familiar especially to readers of Nietzsche, that Christianity is an otherworldly religion whose adherents seek through it to escape the misfortunes of this life.

In the book, Ryan Kemp and I offer the first full-scale philosophical treatment of Robinson’s body of work, guided by an attempt to respond to Friedrich Nietzsche’s influential critique of Christianity as other-worldly, ascetic, and “life-denying.” We argue not merely that Nietzsche’s critique does not apply to Robinson’s Christianity, but that the latter can itself be read as a stirring response to Nietzsche’s worries about life-denial and nihilism at the core of modern life. The very religion that in Nietzsche’s view paved the way for contemporary nihilism might itself provide a vision that can overcome it.

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Articles Published or Under Review

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"A Modern Polytheism? Nietzsche and James" (The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 34:1 (2020)) -- ​​In this paper, I argue that there is a non-deflationary, philosophically significant sense in which Nietzsche and James might be called polytheists: both advocate a life of openness and receptivity to multiple and potentially irreconcilable sources of inspiration that lie outside our conscious control. [Click here]

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"Teach Stories, Not Debates: On MacIntyre's Suggestion to Use Novels to Teach Ethics" (Expositions 14:1 (2020)) -- This paper is part of an “Ethics in Focus” forum on the relevance of Alasdair MacIntyre’s recent Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016) for ethics education. I argue that MacIntyre suggests that a morally serious course in ethics would make use of novels because they provide both what he calls “sociological self-knowledge” (roughly, the knowledge of how one’s one role(s) fit into a greater historical, social, political and economic context) and an account of what virtues individuals need in order to navigate the peculiar problems their society poses to them. [Click here]

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<TITLE REDACTED> (currently under review) -- In this paper, I argue that our understanding of Nietzsche's highly idiosyncratic use of the concept of "life" can be enriched by seeing it in the context of Max Scheler's analysis of the rank of "vital" values in his Formalism and Non-Formal Ethics of Value. I show that Scheler's view is deeply influenced by Nietzsche, but still points to important differences between the two philosophers' views on the relationship of valuing and life.

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<TITLE REDACTED> (currently under review) - I offer a reading of Nietzsche’s early unpublished essay Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks that focuses on the theme of intuitive thinking as a philosophical methodology. I propose that the importance of the early Greek philosophers lies not in their anticipations of modern scientific theories and philosophies of science, as others have argued, but in their bold willingness to take their own, highly personal responses to the world as revelatory for inquiry, an attitude crucial to what the later Nietzsche was to call “nobility of soul.” 

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Dissertation: Nietzsche and the Task of Philosophy

 

I argue that Nietzsche's philosophy is best understood when looked at through the lens of his answers to key metaphilosophical questions: what is philosophy, and what is its proper relationship to science? Contrary to the now prominent naturalist reading of Nietzsche, whose proponents insist that Nietzsche thinks the methods of philosophy are continuous with those of the sciences, I argue that Nietzsche puts forward a revisionary conception of philosophy, which emphasizes its difference from the sciences. Nietzsche looks forward to "philosophers of the future," who will face the threat of European nihilism successfully not by following the methods of the sciences, but by doing something the sciences could never do -- "creating" and "legislating" values. This process involves not merely proposing new values or new theoretical justifications, but productively addressing the problem Nietzsche calls "nihilism," which is for him the psycho-social malady that renders its sufferers incapable of feeling inspired to action by one's values.