Teaching

The Critique of Ontotheology (Spring 2025): According to Martin Heidegger, metaphysics has “forgotten” its own basic question, the question of the meaning of being: what makes it possible for us to understand entities, things that are, as entities, as things that are? Metaphysics fails to investigate this question while tacitly understanding entities in light of an ideal of explanatory completeness, an ideal that at once explains both what entities are and why they exist. This understanding of being is but the facing side of our failure to appreciate that the source of being’s availability to us is our own essentially finite, temporal, and historical situatedness. Heidegger thinks that this forgetting of being has had grave consequences, not only for metaphysics itself but also for our cultural lives and for our existential condition.
This course will critically consider Heidegger’s influential and sweeping “deconstruction” of the history of Western metaphysics, reading short excerpts from historical texts by Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel alongside Heidegger’s essays and commentaries. As we’ll see, Heidegger makes bold, illuminating, and controversial claims in these contexts—both about the specific thinkers he is interpreting and about metaphysics as such—which repay careful study and deserve critical scrutiny. We will seek to understand Heidegger’s dramatic thesis that the question of being has been forgotten and to weigh its plausibility against the testimony of the tradition and alternative narratives. Finally, we’ll test the resources Heidegger purports to uncover for transforming our relation to being. This will require reflecting on how such themes as anxiety, fallenness, and thankfulness could be implicated in the question of being, as well as on how being itself can be understood to take place as an event. (Syllabus available by request.)

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Winter 2023, with Matthew Boyle): close reading of first Critique and related materials

Critique of Humanism (Spring 2023, with Candace Vogler): readings from Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Fanon, Althusser, Spillers

Introduction to Marx (Fall 2023, with Anton Ford): readings from Capital vol. 1, German Ideology, 1844 Manuscripts, Manifesto, etc., and supplementary material by Aristotle, Feuerbach, Engels, Lenin

Introduction to Metaphysics and Epistemology (Spring 2024, with Ben Callard): topics including realism and anti-realism, causation, the mind/body problem, free will, time, God, justification, skepticism, internalism and externalism; readings from Russell, Nagel, Lewis, Gettier, and others

The Fate of Autonomy (Winter 2025, with Maya Krishnan): readings from Kant, Hegel, Fanon, Adorno, Jaeggi, Butler, Frankfurt, Korsgaard, Enoch, and others

Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (Winter 2026, with Lisa van Alstyne and Laurenz Ramsauer): readings from Aristotle, Kant, Hart, Fuller, Dworkin, and others