My main field of interest is twentieth century European
philosophy, especially phenomenology (the philosophy of Edmund Husserl) and its
development in Heidegger, existentialism (Sartre, Merelau-Ponty, Levinas),
hermeneutics (Gadamer, Ricoeur) and post-structuralism (Derrida, Lyotard). My
systematic interests lie in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and
the philosophy of history. I also do research in the 18th and 19th century
background to contemporary European thought: Kant, German Idealism, Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, and the German neo-Kantians.
My current research continues in the tradition of phenomenological
transcendental philosophy. More specifically, I am interested in the relation
between intentionality and normativity; in other words, in the relation between
our phenomenological experience of a meaningful world and our ability to
respond to norms (standards, ideals, measures, rules, etc. – “norms” in my
sense take many forms) as such, to understand ourselves as acting in light of
them. This fundamental ability (which is, on my view, the essence of what it is
to occupy the first-person stance and is best approached through the
existential notion of “commitment”) is a condition of all ethics, cognition, understanding
and, in general, our being-in-the-world. I hope to draw this work together in a
book on the ontological roots of reason.