I am a scholar of European philosophy since Kant, with a particular interest in German Idealism and Phenomenology. Having written my dissertation on Schelling's philosophy of revelation in the interdisciplinary Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University, I was Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities & Social Change Center at UC Santa Barbara before joining the Rosenzweig Minerva Center. My main research theme at present is the philosophy of love.

The question of love occupies at best a marginal role in most accounts of the history of modern philosophy. This is no accident, for modern philosophy’s focal point is, first, the knowing subject of theoretical reason, and second, the acting subject of practical reason. Love, in such a frame, can only appear as a mere feeling. Against this, my research at the Center will investigate the work of Franz Rosenzweig to argue the contrary thesis: that our relationships to world, self, and other can only be understood if they are seen as not consisting primarily in knowing and in doing, but must be thought of as grounded in a prior attuned-affective disclosure. The oldest and best name for such disclosure is love. But if love is so conceived, it cannot be thought of as merely an anthropological fact or a salient feature of our moral lives. Love first makes possible and reveals world, self, and other to us in ways that are at once metaphysical, ethical, and religious.