Academic Projects
Prolegomena:
Cosmos on the Inside: Taking the Side of the Subject (2021)
This paper serves as a prolegomena for ideas discussed at further length in my PhD. It draws upon the social theory of Cornelius Castoriadis, and in particular his concepts of the radical imagination and the social imaginary, to develop a nuanced understanding of the agency and structure debate. Together, these concepts give flesh to the subject - who at once exists on the inside and outside of institutional organisation. The essay asks what in particular exists on the ‘outside’ of structure - identifying the imagination in the process.
Stated differently, this is no neat mereology: the absolute totality of parts are not encompassed in the collective whole. In other words: agents have inalienable and radical powers sui generis, insofar that the subject is disposed to individual transcendence despite existing in tense relationship with society.
This essay develops two arguments. First, it states that the subject is to be considered as ‘atomistic’, locating the cosmos from within qua the radical inner life of the subject, emphasising the notion of creativity as a power housed in the radical productive faculty of the imagination. The second task is to develop a new understanding of the domain of culture and its relationship to the subject, doing so by appealing to an aesthetic philosophy that moves away from – and goes beyond – the traditional demand for artistic expression qua representation, achieving this by way of the sublime. Alternatively, it is an aesthetic ‘structured’ by feeling, engagement, and experience. It is an aesthetics of process and poiēsis, oscillating between the real and the imagined, simultaneously in the folds of world-disclosure and of world-making.
Minor Thesis:
The Structure of Wine Appreciation and its Connection to Aesthetic Experience (2020)
This thesis addresses a lacuna in philosophical discourse regarding the aesthetic dimensions of wine tasting. It takes as its central assumption that considered wine tasting provides an opportunity for an aesthetic experience sui generis, akin to an engagement with other traditionally accepted aesthetic mediums, such as painting or poetry. As a result, this paper indirectly asserts that artefacts of gustatory taste and smell have at least some aesthetic value as valid aesthetic artefacts.
This assumption generates two interlaced strands: a flexible ‘scaffolding’ of an aesthetic experience of wine that outlines the conditions of possibility for such an experience, which in turn produces a guide stating how one ought to properly taste wine to then have the very best experience of it.
In order to advance these points, this thesis integrates the contrasting accounts of aesthetic experience and judgement of French poet Paul Valéry as detailed throughout his oeuvre, and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), locating a gap for wine to fit into. Particular emphasis is paid to the Kantian notion of ‘free play’, which is understood via Paul Guyer’s ‘metacognitive’ interpretation of the notion which ties Kantian determinative’ and ‘reflective’ judgment together.
Resultantly, three distinct yet connected forms of pleasure are identified, and the case is made that wine satisfies all of these: gratifying pleasure, purposive pleasure, and formal (aesthetic) pleasure, where formal pleasure necessarily qualifies an experience as aesthetic.
Overall, this thesis asserts that deploying concepts and categories improves the particular experience of wine without diminishing feeling in favour of understanding, and redeploys Kendall Walton’s notion of categories and Gestalts, integrating them into an account of aesthetic experience. These are then extended, thus suggesting that ‘grab-bags’ and ‘ideal-types’ are also important aspects for consideration in the wine tasting process.
Essay:
Thinking About Doing and Acting Accordingly: Merleau-Ponty and Social Theory (2020)
This essay articulates the sociological value present in Merleau-Ponty’s most influential work, the Phenomenology of Perception (1945). In particular, the notions of embodiment, situatedness, ambiguity, and freedom all come together and establish a solid foundation for social theorising.
This essay claims that the Phenomenology of Perception alone cannot create a sufficiently rigorous account of the individual agent in relation to the social world. It requires a hermeneutic skeleton that explains what it means to do a practical and applied phenomenology with transformative effects. Following, this demands a more acute acknowledgement of social dynamics and constructed values, that is, of a supervening layer of power qua a “battlefield of social struggles” that confronts being and complicates it (Bourdieu 1993 p. 148).
This discussion finds its complement in the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, intertwining to form an extended account of what it means to inhabit the sociocultural world, and crucially, detailing what can be done upon realising one’s own situatedness within it. Bourdieu fruitfully develops Merleau-Ponty’s notion of conditioned and situated freedom, exploring the implications of agential transformation and social mobility that are latent in Merleau-Ponty’s account.
Essay:
What Can I Know and What Ought I Do? Kantian Reason and its Radical Consequences (2020)
This essay performs a lateral and close reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), and argues that as a consequence of Kant’s Copernican Revolution what results is a radicalisation of the subject. Thus established, this paper forecasts what such a radical subjectivism looks like, along with its inevitably negative consequences. Chiefly, I suggest that from such a radical subjectivism a problematic anthropocentrism follows.
Supporting this interpretation, I draw upon a corpus of reactionary post-Kantian literature stemming from the traditions of Postmodernism and Critical Theory: especially that of Adorno who provides a descriptive and historically situated account of this claim. By demonstrating that Kant’s ‘emancipation’ of the subject results in the heralding of a privileged anthropocentric ontology of human cognisers, I argue that Heidegger’s concerns regarding humankind’s increasing technologisation, is (in major part) a consequence of the Kantian critical project.
The apotheosis of Heidegger’s vision of the future is manifest in the present day, and takes on a decidedly eschatological and hyperreal vision in the hyperbolic and nihilistic commentary of Baudrillard. By nihilism, I refer to Baudrillard’s "obsession with disappearance", which reiterates and problematises the Kantian critical project, which, put inversely, prompts “the destruction of appearances” that at its hyperreal apogee sees the disappearance of humans themselves (Baudrillard 1994, pp. 159-164).
Nonetheless, this paper does not conclude with a totally pessimistic nor nihilistic vision of the world, and by introducing Kant’s later Critique of Judgement (1790) and its discussion of ‘aesthetic ideas’ and the radical ‘genius’, some of the anxieties of the First Critique are soothed. This comparative reading finds an unlikely ally in Baudrillard who, like the Kant of the Third Critique, locates an authentic version of ‘freedom’ and ‘radicality’ that is inalienable from all humans as a universal anthropocentric potentiality that cannot be captured completely by determinative cognitive judgement as framed in the First Critique.