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/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 general ethical question, “how ought one to live?” The Romantic answer is to live in the mood of responsive love or, what I argue is equivalent, authenticity. In following this ideal, one becomes a creative participant in what the German poet and philosopher Novalis calls “the formation of the earth,” a project we contribute to just by living. From the Romantic point of view, the world is essentially “incomplete” because we are. In our form of life, the task of living is 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 of authenticity and its anti-ideal of despair (a kind of spiritual torpor) while trying to rescue the outlook from what might otherwise seem to be two intractable paradoxes it generates: first, that all our acts could never fail to be authentic, undermining authenticity’s claim to being an ethical ideal; and second, that the individual who best follows this ideal does not act of their own initiative at all, but is entirely passive with respect to the things that capture their interest.

“The Concept of Romantische Poesie" (draft available upon request) provides an original interpretation of the Schlegel brothers’ concept of romantische Poesie. This concept has proven to be a subject of scholarly controversy because of its complex place in the Schlegel brothers’ thought and its development: beginning as an idea Friedrich Schlegel uses to caricature everything in modern art he dislikes, it somehow becomes 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 the expansion in its scope. My interpretation seeks to do both. According to this reading, romantische Poesie is a conception of human activity as essentially imaginative and expressive. It is a form of activity properly governed by an ideal we cannot reach 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 is possible. The ideal of romantische Poesie combines the circularity of the ancient party’s understanding of history and the linearity of the modern’s conception of progress into an “exzentrische Bahn,” or “spiral path,” of ideal human progress that the Schlegel brothers develop by thinking about the history and nature of poetry and religious myth.

“Jacobi’s Interpretation of Hume”  (draft available upon request) explores a curious turn in the history of early modern philosophy. Hume’s skeptical reflections on belief and its origins, which the philosopher himself took to undermine religious faith and traditional metaphysical speculation, eventually made him a hero among German philosophers like Hamann and Jacobi, who saw his conception of belief as the key to defending faith against the false pretensions of Enlightened reason. They believed that their interpretation of Hume cut against Hume’s own stated convictions, but they were nonetheless confident they had grasped his core philosophical insights. 

In this article, I try to vindicate at least some of their confidence. I argue that Jacobi’s understanding of Humean belief provides a compelling and even charitable resolution to a famous tension in Hume’s philosophy—a tension between his destructive skepticism and his constructive naturalism. The key to this resolution lies in Jacobi’s reframing of Hume’s metaphysical project around the question of the meaning of being—that is, of what it is for something to exist. From recognizably Humean premises, Jacobi arrives at a less recognizably Humean conclusion: that what it is for something to exist is for it to offer resistance to our intelligent life-activities, thereby making us believe in the thing’s independence from us. Like Hume, Jacobi believes that discursive reason cannot grasp the ground of such a belief—making his conclusion “skeptical”—and yet, again like Hume, he believes no such grasp is needed in order to support this natural conviction—making his conclusion “naturalistic.” While Jacobi takes this point to have religious implications that he knows Hume rejected, I argue that Hume could have reasonably questioned those implications while endorsing Jacobi’s resolution to the tension between his skepticism and naturalism. Indeed, I suggest that this response would be in keeping with Hume’s main philosophical ambitions. 

“Cartesian Doubt”  (draft available upon request) looks to understand a single, crucial sentence from the First Meditation:

Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as carefully as I do those which are patently false. (AT VII 18)

Notably, the meditator does not say here or elsewhere how reason leads them to this conclusion. Thus, while the meditator has just bound themselves to a rule of assent that will structure their procedure in the remainder of the Meditations, neither they nor Descartes ever explain why they have bound themselves to this rule. In this article, I defend an original proposal for why the meditator adopts this rule of assent. I argue that an adequate interpretation of the reasoning behind this rule for assent must meet three criteria: it must explain why the rule of assent requires certainty; it must support real doubts; and it must support “the essential inference from doubt,” from the fact that I cannot doubt that I exist while I am doubting the existence of everything else to the conclusion that thought is essential to me as a thinking thing. No extant interpretations of the rule of assent satisfies all three criteria, but I propose an interpretation that does. According to this proposal, Descartes’ method of doubt is designed to allow the meditator to achieve knowledge of what is ontologically primitive or basic. The meditator adopts their rule of assent in order to acquire this knowledge.

Book Projects

The Recovery of the Imagination is a revision of my dissertation monograph into a book that builds the case for my interpretation of the Romantics and its significance for contemporary ethical thought.  

I also plan to write a book on Romantic political thought, building on research from my dissertation, by looking at 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 will focus on is a numbness in which the ideas of interest, motivation, or value themselves seem strange. The book will develop and support the traditional Romantic diagnosis of the modern malaise as a sickness of alienation—a despair that partakes of dependence on others—which it would distinguish from inauthenticity—a despair of one’s own making. It will look for a Romantic remedy to 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 will expand the social horizons of the Romantic outlook developed in my other research while tackling the large and controversial subject of Romantic political thought. 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.