Education
Ph.D. in Philosophy at Queen’s University
Five year fully funded (Bombardier SSHRC) degree awarded on October 2022 in Kingston, ON.
Dissertation: This dissertation places the philosophy of Simone Weil into conversation with contemporary environmental concerns in that epoch sometimes referred to as the Anthropocene. Weil’s work has been influential in many fields, including politically and theologically based critiques of social inequalities and suffering, but rarely linked to ecology. There are many reasons for this, including Weil’s own ethical focus on human existence, the notoriously unsystematic nature of her writings, but also, her work’s very specific metaphysical associations which seem to restrict its potential audience. Contra these apparent barriers, this thesis argues that Weil’s work can be understood as offering a coherent approach with potentially widespread appeal applicable to our ethical relations to much more than just other human beings.
This claim is approached through a detailed understanding of two linked concepts in Weil’s work, namely, ‘decreation’; key to Weil’s understanding of ethics as entailing the worldly dissolution of the small-self or ego, and ‘metaxu’, a concept she adapts from her reading of Plato. Decreation is traced though Weil’s accounts of the human faculties she considers give our lives meaning and purpose. Far from being nihilistic, as is sometimes claimed, Weil reveals the ethical possibilities that emerge through truly facing and accepting the reality of each faculties’ orientation towards unattainable ideals thwarted by life’s absurdity, impermanence, and sufferings. Many past environmental thinkers have argued that Plato exemplifies, or even instigates, a form of anti-ecological Western philosophy that is dualistic and other-worldly in terms of its positing a metaphysical realm of timeless ideas exempt from the transformations of this-worldly entanglements. I argue that Weil’s non-traditional reading of Plato reconciles this movement between actual and ideal (metaxu) to the kind of non-dualistic and non-hierarchical “entanglement” necessary for an ecological ethics.
Following the movement of deep ecology, I then suggest that the process of decreation in Weil is an expansion of the self which might also come to include the surrounding earth and a vast assemblage of others. Ultimately, then, the dissertation works with Weil’s thought to suggest a decreative ecological ethics that decenters the human being by cultivating human actions towards an ecological ethics.
https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/30301
Image: Raíces. Frida Kahlo. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection, 1943.
Master’s in Theory and Criticism at Western University
Two year dissertation and course work Master’s Degree in London, Ontario, Canada. Degree awarded 2017.
Dissertation: Rationality points to the complete annihilation and end of a life when the body perishes, and yet when a loved one dies we continue to experience that person in a myriad of ways. The focus of this thesis will be a phenomenological exploration of the earthly afterlife of those we have loved and lost. By positing the subject as always intersubjective and as temporal in nature, this thesis investigates how we continue to create and interact with the deceased upon the earth. Using the thought of Bergson, Levinas, Arendt, Irigaray, and Heidegger this work aims to conceptualize, celebrate, and live our relationships in a temporally liminal and environmentally vitalist way.
Image: Jordan Marklund. Shadow and Shed. Photograph. 2010.
Visiting Graduate Student and Summer Schools
Lent Term/ Winter 2020: Visiting Student Fellowship at Cambridge University, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, UK (Supervisors: Dr. Stephen Plant and Dr. Simone Kotva.)
Summer 2016: Theory and Criticism Summer School on vitalism at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (Branka Arsić.)
Summer 2015: Tilburg University Summer school on Nihilism, Tilburg, Netherlands (Simon Critchley.)
Image: Florine Stettheimer. Family Portrait II. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1933.