Research Summary

My research focuses on central questions in the philosophy and ethics of technology, the philosophy of art, and the phenomenology of time. I am motivated by a pair deep phenomenological intuitions that a) time and our experience of it are central to our lived human experience, and b) art and technology are the primary means by which we are able to explore and manipulate the possibilities of that experience. I take “technology” to broadly include the wide array of human activities that involve the mediated manipulation of ourselves and our world. In this way, art can be seen (if only in part) as a kind of tool to alter, shape, and explore the possibilities of time.

In addition to these deep metaphysical and phenomenological questions, I am concerned with the practical and ethical questions generated by the explosive development of modern technologies. Given my interest in aesthetics and phenomenology, I am especially interested in Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality technologies.

To the right you will find a brief overview of my dissertation and links to several papers and abstracts for ongoing and completed projects. Below you will find my Research Portfolio which includes a more developed dissertation summary, a research statement, and several writing samples.

Dissertation: The Phenomenology of Time & the Technology of Art: Merleau-Ponty, Temporality, and the Rupture of Freedom↓

  • First Reader: Daniel Dahlstrom, Silber Professor of Philosophy (Boston University)

  • Second Reader: Allen Speight, Associate Professor of Philosophy (Boston University)

  • Third Reader: Walter Hopp, Associate Professor of Philosophy (Boston University)

Summary: This dissertation argues for the claims that (a) art can be understood as a kind of technological mediation relation, (b) this mediation relation consists in a kind of self-experimentation and modification, and (c), that a core aspect of this experimentation is with human temporality. As a result, I argue that a core feature of art is its capacity to experiment with and reshape human temporality. In art, we build our time. I establish (a) and (b) through a careful exploration of both the ontology and phenomenology of art and aesthetic experiences, and then appeal to the postphenomenological works of Don Ihde, Peter-Paul Verbeek, and Robert Rosenberger, and to Alva Noë’s conception of art as a “strange tool.” I argue that artworks serve as a unique kind of mediation relation between self and self. The mediation has two steps. The first, which can be characterized as (Self—Art)→Self, reflects the moment of deep immersion in a work of art, where the audience is almost completely absorbed in the aesthetic experience (say, of watching a film). The second moment, which can be characterized as Self→(Art—Self), reflects the phase of pulling back from a work, and examining the self as someone in the midst of an aesthetic experience. This oscillation allows for a special access to the conditions for not just aesthetic engagement, but positional human phenomenology more generally. Art, then, can be understood as a technology that mediates between self and self.
Though this oscillation audiences and artists can experiment with the possibilities of human perception, embodiment, cognition, and so on. Most importantly, they can experiment with the possibilities of human temporality. To clarify this point, I appeal to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s seminal Phénoménologie de la perception and the incredibly insightful account of temporality provided there. I then clarify my account by drawing on three important case studies of powerful works of art--Terrance Malick's "The Tree of Life," Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," and Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay."

Papers in Phenomenology, Aesthetics, and the Philosophy of Time↓

Papers in the Philosophy and Ethics of Technology↓

Papers in Ethics, Politics and the History of Philosophy↓

  • The Pleasantness of Pleasures: An Argument against Hedonistic Theories of Well-Being from the Non-Comparability of Pleasures

  • Nietzsche and Governance: Meritocracy, Democracy, and Agonal Oligarchy (Master’s Thesis)

  • Sickness not unto Death: Health and Convalescence in the Later Nietzsche

  • Freedom and Constraint: Towards a Power-Oriented Theory of Social Coercion

  • For Want of a Subject: Bradley, Epicurus, and the No-Subject Problemt