PUBLICATIONS

You can download many of my publications on academia.edu.

Kant and Environmental Racism

Rivista di estetica (Forthcoming)

Kant on the Human Animal: Anthropology, Ethics, Race

Northwestern University Press (2022)

While Immanuel Kant's account of human reason is well known and celebrated, his account of human animality (Thierheit) is virtually unknown. Animality and reason, as pillars of Kant's vision of human nature, are original and ineradicable. And yet, the relation between them is fraught: at times tense and violent, at other times complementary, even harmonious. Kant on the Human Animal offers the first systematic analysis of this central but neglected dimension of Kant's philosophy.

Reviewed in Kantian Review, Journal of Moral Philosophy, Journal of the History of Philosophy (forthcoming)

Interview Featured on New Books Network

Settler Colonialism and the US Conservation Movement: Contesting Histories, Indigenizing Futures

Ethics, Policy & Environment (2021, co-authored with Lauren Eichler)

Despite recent strides in the direction of achieving a more equitable and genuine place for Indigenous voices in the conservation conversation, the conservation movement must more deliberately and thoroughly grapple with the legacy of its deeply settler colonial history if it is to, in actuality and not merely in rhetoric, achieve the aim of being more equitable. In this article, we show how the conservation movement, historically and still largely today, traffics in certain ethical and political values that are, in principle or in effect, anti-Indigenous. Through this examination, we hope to reveal how present-day conservation efforts, even if ‘well-meaning’ or nominally deferential regarding Indigenous peoples and perspectives, in fact reinforce settler colonial structures. In particular, we critique the notion of the uninhabited wilderness as a conservation ideal and the disavowal of originary violence (along with a parallel positing of settler nativism) in the articulation of conservation historicity and the founding of conservation movements. We conclude by offering some steps conservationists can take to alter their practices, methods, and values in ways that recognize, respect, and reciprocate with Indigenous peoples.

Black Animality from Kant to Fanon

Theory & Event (2021)

This essay examines the animalization of Black human beings in the texts of Immanuel Kant and Frantz Fanon. The two thinkers are positioned as key markers in a broader stream of modern theorizing surrounding race, colonialism, and the manifestation of human animality at different poles of the racial-colonial spectrum. Approaching them side by side generates insight that consideration of either in isolation would not allow: Kant's place in the history of racist and colonialist thought is further substantiated, while a new dimension of Fanon's still-unfolding contribution to the exposure and dismantling of this enterprise is revealed.

Predators and Pests: Settler Colonialism and the Animalization of Native Americans

Environmental Ethics (2020, co-authored with Lauren Eichler)

The tethering of Indigenous peoples to animality has long been a central mechanism of settler colonialism. Focusing on North America from the seventeenth century to the present, this essay argues that Indigenous animalization stems from the settler imposition onto Native Americans of dualistic notions of human/animal difference, coupled with the settler view that full humanity hinges on the proper cultivation of land. To further illustrate these claims, we attend to how Native Americans have been and continue to be animalized as both predators and pests, and show how these modes of animalization have and continue to provide settlers motive and justification for the elimination of Native peoples and the extractive domination of Native lands.

Animality in Kant’s Theory of Human Nature

Kant and Animals (Oxford, 2020)

This chapter provides an overview of Kant’s conception of the animality (or Tierheit) of human beings. Though human animality is treated in a wide range of Kant’s writings, it has received relatively little attention from scholars, perhaps because Kant wrote no text principally devoted to the subject. With the aim of establishing its systematic unity, I track the status and role of animality across three distinct but interrelated domains of Kant’s theory of human nature—his account of animality as one of three basically good original human predispositions in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, his account of animality as the target of discipline in the pedagogy lectures, and his account of animality as simultaneously a driver of and hindrance to the progress of history in ‘Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Aim’. I argue that these accounts, taken together and in light of the teleological vision of human development that connects them, manifest a distinctively Kantian vision of the human as an actively rational, but at the same time ineliminably animal, being. Far from denying that humans are animals or seeking to repress human animality wholesale, Kant in fact offers a nuanced and robust, though still problematic, defence of the necessity, innocence, and originality of the human’s animal side.

Predatory Masculinity and Domestic Violence in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter

Philosophy, Film, and the Dark Side of Interdependence (Lexington, 2020)

This chapter sketches a new account of domestic violence that takes as its point of departure the interdependence of humans upon one another as animal beings. Modifying the trope of the “sexual predator,” I propose that many forms of domestic violence (whether of a sexual or nonsexual nature) can productively be approached as intra-specific domestic predation. Just as not all sexual violence is the work of sexual predators, not all domestic violence is the work of domestic predators. Nonetheless, as I aim to show, domestic predation is a uniquely pernicious type of domestic violence, and so warrants attention in its own right. As with sexual predation, domestic predation need not be fatal in effect or intent, as the bio-ecological sense of predation usually entails. Rather, domestic predation denotes a certain predatory mode of action on the part of the domestic predator vis-à-vis their victims (domestic prey). To denote this predatory mode of action, I use the terms predatory logic or logic of predation. While predatory logic underlies a wide range of intra- and inter-specific human relationships not examined as such in this chapter (including the hunting of nonhuman animals and the capture, enslavement, or extermination of human beings), it plays an especially strong role in many cases of domestic violence.​

Kant, Chakrabarty, and the Crises of the Anthropocene

Environmental Ethics (2019)

Dipesh Chakrabarty has identified Immanuel Kant’s distinction between the human’s moral and animal dimensions as an underlying source of the failure of the humanities to respond to the ecological crises of the anthropocene. Though relevant for the environmental humanities generally, Chakrabarty’s critique is especially germane to contemporary environmental philosophy. It shows how the reality of anthropogenic climate change renders central aspects of Kant’s influential conception of human nature untenable. While closer examination of Kant’s writings corroborates the core of Chakrabarty’s reading, there nonetheless remain positive resources in Kant’s philosophy for contemporary environmental thinking. For, although Kant does regard the human’s moral and animal dimensions as conceptually separable, he also understands them to be inextricably bound within the nature of human beings. Attending to the interplay between these Kantian commitments, a new critical insight into one of the basic tensions of the Anthropocene era can be attained.

The Human/Animal Logic of Sovereignty: Derrida on Robinson Crusoe

Environmental Philosophy (2019)

This essay offers an analysis of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe read in concert with Derrida’s treatment of the novel in the second volume of The Beast and the Sovereign. Drawing from Derrida while developing insights of my own, I assemble the elements of a unique account and critique of the logic of human sovereignty. Focusing on a crucial moment in both the novel and in Derrida’s reading of it, I argue the thesis that human sovereignty rests upon a logically prior mastery of both non-human animals and subordinated human beings—a relation of mastery I call the human/ animal logic of sovereignty. ​

Hunting for Justice: An Indigenous Critique of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation

Environment and Society (2018, co-authored with Lauren Eichler)

Reprinted in Indigenous Resurgence: Decolonialization and Movements for Environmental Justice, edited by Jaskiran Dhillon, Berghahn (2022)

Within the mainstream environmental movement, regulated hunting is commonly defended as a tool for preserving and managing populations of wild animals for future generations. We argue that this justification, encapsulated in the seven principles of the “North American Model of Wildlife Conservation,” perpetuates settler colonialism—an institutional and theoretical apparatus that systemically exterminates Indigenous peoples, expropriates Indigenous lands, and disqualifies Indigenous worldviews—insofar as it manifests an anthropocentric ideology that objectifies hunted animals as “natural resources” to be extracted. Because this ideology is antithetical to Indigenous views, its imposition through hunting regulation interrupts Indigenous lifeways, contributing to the destruction of Indigenous identity.

Physical Education in Kant's Lectures on Pedagogy

Natur und Freiheit: Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses (De Gruyter, 2018)

In the Lectures on Pedagogy, Kant outlines a program of education treating the human as both a physical and a practical being. While “physical education” treats the human’s animal nature, “practical education” prepares the human to “live as a freely acting being.” Scholars have recently turned to Kant’s account of practical education as a resource for better substantiating Kant’s call for a “moral anthropology” to complement his moral philosophy in its pure form. Kant’s account of physical education, however, has received less attention. This essay offers an overview of Kant’s view of physical education in the Lectures. Focusing on the central relation between discipline and human animality, I show how Kant’s view of physical education, while arguably of tertiary relevance to his moral philosophy, nonetheless reveals much about his general theory of human nature—and in particular about the tension between our animal nature and our properly human capacity for free action.

Social Conceptions of Moral Agency in Hegel and Sellars

International Journal of Philosophical Studies (2017)

This essay contributes to our understanding of the relation between the philosophies of Hegel and Sellars. While most treatments of this relation have focused on metaphysics or epistemology, I focus on ethics, and in particular on the formulation of moral agency. I argue that Hegel and Sellars arrive at a similar metaphilosophical rejection of individual moral agency in favor of conceptions of moral agency as the outcome of social mediation. To demonstrate this, I trace how Hegel and Sellars offer parallel resolutions of the ‘Kantian paradox’: the apparent problem that, in Kantian ethics, moral agents must both freely self-legislate the moral law unto themselves and stand in a dutiful relation to the moral law as a necessary function of practical reason. Drawing Hegel and Sellars together in this way casts new light on Sellars’s understudied ethical theory and further evidences the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s moral philosophy.

Derrida on Carnophallogocentrism and the Primal Parricide

Derrida Today (2017)

This article discusses the concept of carnophallogocentrism and its place in Derrida’s philosophy of animality. I read Derrida’s embryonic account of carnophallogocentrism in light of his treatment of the primal parricide of Freud’s Totem and Taboo and suggest that opening this interpretive channel allows us to grasp how carnophallogocentrism can contribute to the history of ‘anthropo-centric subjectivity’ that Derrida diagnoses in The Animal That Therefore I Am. In conversation with recent commentators, I begin by characterizing carnophallogocentrism as the idea that a symbolic yet constitutive schema of ingestion underlies the relation between ‘man’ and ‘animal’. I then turn to Freud’s image of the primal parricide and to Derrida’s treatment of it in several texts. Given the strong structural parallels between carnophallogocentrism and the primal parricide—which figures human civilization as the historical product of a founding event of patriarchal violence and sacrificial ingestion—attending to Derrida’s treatment of the primal parricide helps us fill out his view of carnophallogocentrism, and so better appreciate the breadth of his approach to the historical relation between humans and other animals.

Rationality, Animality, and Human Nature: Reconsidering Kant’s View of the Human/Animal Relation

Konturen (2014)

Kant is often criticized for his strict separation of humans and animals as categorically distinct entities. This separation hinges on the fact that, for Kant, humans are rational, while non-human animals are wholly irrational. This essay argues that a strict separation of rational humanity and irrational animality, prominent in many areas of Kant’s thinking, does not characterize his view of the human/ animal relation overall. For, within Kant’s theory of human nature, rationality and animality are in fact entwined, with both contributing to the goodness and full realization of human life. Through engagement with Kant’s writings on human nature, it is suggested that Kant’s view of the human/ animal relation merits reconsideration by Kant scholars and animal-oriented philosophers alike.

Ecological Political Theory and Ontological Connection

American Dialectic (2014)

In this response to Rebecca Ploof’s “Realizing Humanity through Animality,” I pose a question about the kind of ecological political theory that follows from Ploof’s highly insightful reading of Leviathan. If the formation of a proper commonwealth involves the human emulation of naturally sociable non-human animals, then can a strict ontological differentiation of humans from other animals be preserved? Or must a certain degree of ontological connection between humans and other animals be granted in order for this process of emulation to be possible at all?

From Philosophy of Race to Antiracist Politics: On Rorty’s Approach to Race and Racism

Philosophy in the Contemporary World (2014)

Shannon Sullivan has criticized Richard Rorty for the discrepancy in his treatments of Cornel West and Marilyn Frye’s prophetic philosophies, which Sullivan reads to indicate a racial bias on Rorty’s part. This article defends Rorty from this criticism, first clarifying his view of the discontinuous relation of philosophy to politics, then, on the basis of this clarification, arguing that Rorty’s different treatments of West and Frye do not reveal a racial bias as Sullivan claims. Finally, revisiting Rorty’s exchange with Nancy Fraser, it is argued that although Rorty has no philosophy of race, he does offer a strong antiracist politics.

Other Publications

Introduction to Special Issue: Reading Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign (​Environmental Philosophy, 2019)

The Cold Light of Class (Times Higher Education, 2019)

Philosophy Courses Must Not Shy Away From Suicide (Times Higher Education, 2018)

Review of Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us About Politics (Contemporary Political Theory, 2015)