WRITING

PUBLICATIONS

“The Cartesian Passions as Inclinations and Descartes’ Alienated Anthropology ,” 2026, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 34(4), 604–627.

Download the penultimate draft here. 

Abstract. The passions occupy an uncomfortable position in Descartes’ philosophical anthropology: not only do they seem to live somewhere in between the mind and the body, but they also seem to straddle the divide between active volitions and passive perceptions. On top of this, commentators have struggled to determine whether the passions play a representational role in the mind or a purely motivational one. This essay addresses these interpretative issues by showing that Cartesian passions are what Tamar Schapiro calls inclinations, emotions that incline us to perform mental actions. By providing a more accurate picture of the passions, the essay also challenges the popular idea that the Cartesian passions help unify or reveal the unity of Descartes’ human being, an idea that looks to mitigate the criticism that Descartes offers a starkly dualistic anthropology. This essay argues that, to the contrary, Descartes’ conception of the passions exposes his thought to precisely this criticism, reinforcing his dualism and promoting an alienated, mechanical perspective on the mind.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

Articles Under Review or Being Prepared for Review

An article on the nature of desire (title redacted for anonymous review; draft available upon request)

An article on the imagination (title redacted for anonymous review; draft available upon request)

A co-written article on perfectionist ethics (title redacted for anonymous review; draft available upon request)

Articles in Progress

“Love as an Ethical Ideal” (draft available upon request) articulates the Romantic answer to the ethical question, “how ought one to live?” The Romantic answer is to live in the mood of responsive love or authenticity. To follow this ideal is to be a creative participant in what Novalis calls “the formation of the earth,” a project we contribute to just by living. From this Romantic point of view, the world is essentially “incomplete” because we are. The task of living in our form of life is thus to to help complete the world by infusing it with our own passionate interest, pursuing this ethical ideal through the exercise of the creative imagination. I present this ideal and its anti-ideal of inauthenticity while trying to rescue the outlook from what might otherwise seem to be two intractable paradoxes this approach generates: first, that it seems to imply all our acts could never fail to be authentic, undermining its claim to being an ethical ideal; and second, that the properly authentic individual does not seem to be especially creative at all, but merely reacts to the things they encounter. 

“The Concept of Romantische Poesie” (draft available upon request) provides an original interpretation of the Schlegel brothers’ concept of romantische Poesie. The concept has been a subject of long-running scholarly controversy because of its complex place in the Schlegel brothers’ thought and its development. Beginning as a term of abuse for the kind of modern literature Friedrich Schlegel disliked, it became the brothers’ ideal for all human activity. Interpreters have struggled to make sense of the flip in the concept’s value polarity while also grasping its expansion in scope. My interpretation seeks to do both. It maintains that romantische Poesie is an essentially imaginative and expressive conception of human activity, one properly governed by an ideal we can never achieve once and for all but must strive to reach again and again. I argue that this concept marks the Schlegel brothers’ intervention into the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, a complex early modern debate about whether human cultural progress was possible. The ideal of romantische Poesie combines the circularity of the ancient party’s understanding of history with the linearity of the moderns' conception of progress into an “exzentrische Bahn,” or “spiral path,” of ideal human development that the Schlegel brothers arrive by thinking about the history and nature of poetry and religious myth. 

Book Projects

The Recovery of the Imagination would be a revision of my dissertation for publication as a book. 

An Affliction of the Air: Love and Despair in Modern Life would explore representations and discussions of love and despair in modern literature, art, critical theory, and philosophy. Unlike sorrow, a heavy sadness concerning a great loss of value, or penseroso melancholy, a gentle and maybe even pleasant sense of the transience of things, despair of the sort I would focus on is a numbness in which the ideas of interest, motivation, or value themselves seem strange. The book would support the traditional Romantic diagnosis of the modern malaise as a sickness of alienation—a despair that can be influenced by others—which it would distinguish from inauthenticity—a despair of one’s own making. The book would find a Romantic remedy for both forms of despair in an ethic of creative love, one that seeks and provides acknowledgement, satisfying our desire for recognition through intrinsically vulnerable intimate bonds and formative institutions. My hope is that this book would give me the opportunity to expand the social horizons of the Romantic outlook developed in my other research while tackling the large and controversial subject of Romantic political thought. The book would also try to show that we can make sense of the depth of modern alienation without indulging in any kind of nostalgia or preference for earlier, less democratic social arrangements.