Analytic Existentialism

The aim of this research project is to develop themes from existentialism in analytic philosophy and to offer analytically defensible reconstructions of existentialist thought.

Analytic Existentialism (co-edited with Mark Schroeder, Oxford University Press, 2024)

Existentialist philosophy has, at times, been exceptionally popular. This is because of its promise of possibility, both in doctrine and in style: Its doctrine promises that we can break free from the shackles of cognitive or social structures we are thrown into, and we can overcome our marred personal or collective history. Its style promises that philosophy can be exciting, moving, exhilarating, and funny.

Analytic Existentialism brings together ten essays in which analytic philosophers engage with existentialism. The essays take up central existentialist themes, such as freedom, consciousness, and bad faith. Some bring existentialist ideas to bear on issues in contemporary analytic philosophy; some engage analytically with existentialist concerns; some employ the methods of analytic philosophy to interpret existentialist texts; and some articulate how existentialist insights speak to ongoing matters of concern outside of philosophy. All essays, taken together, make good on the existentialist promise for analytic philosophy: Even as analytic philosophers, we can embrace the thought that freedom is at the heart of our being. And even as analytic philosophers, we can write philosophical texts that capture the imagination. We trust that these essays can rekindle the excitement of philosophical thought.

Embodied Freedom: An Analytic Interpretation of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (Oxford University Press, under contract)

The central aim of this book is to offer an interpretation of Being and Nothingness that presents an analytically rigorous, systematic account of existentialism. At its core lies a proper interpretation of the notion of freedom. On Sartre’s view at its best, I argue, freedom is to be understood as always in situation and as embodied. It is its embodiment and its situatedness that saves freedom from being gratuitous. And it is its embodiment and its situatedness that does justice to the thought that we are at once subjects and objects—subjects, insofar as we are free, and objects, insofar as we are embodied and social creatures with a particular history, biology and psychology. As a model for my methodological approach of analytic interpretation, I take P.F. Strawson’s interpretation of Kant’s First Critique in his seminal The Bounds of Sense.