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Research keywords:
Kant; Modern Philosophy; Philosophy of Metaphor; Copernican Revolution

Dissertation title:
Kant's Copernican Experiment

Dissertation abstract:
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is commonly interpreted through the metaphor of a Copernican Revolution. Due to its interpretive richness, this popular metaphor has overshadowed a distinct metaphor Kant utilized in the B-Preface to describe his work by analogy to Copernicus. In my dissertation I argue, first, that the richness and depth of the Copernican Revolution metaphor is largely the result of historical changes this metaphor would undergo after Kant—specifically the conflation of the Copernican Revolution and the Scientific Revolution. Second, I argue that acknowledging this alongside a close reading of the B-Preface reveals a distinct metaphor invoked by Kant in reference to Copernicus. This new metaphor is that of Kant's Copernican Experiment. It reveals an existential experiment, performed by the reader, upon the principles of human reason itself. In addition to shedding light on the meaning of the text of the B-Preface, and thus Kant's understanding of the unity of the critical project as of 1786, this interpretation offers a new argument structure for the Critique of Pure Reason. Most notably, the argumentative roles of the Transcendental Deduction and the Transcendental Dialectic, specifically the Antinomies, are fundamentally rethought. The Transcendental Deduction is stripped of its supposed role to ground transcendental idealism tout court and reinterpreted as a proof for the possibility of transcendental idealism, that is, the tenability of the experiment's hypothesis that objects conform to cognition. The antinomies of pure reason are reinterpreted as the touchstone for the transformation from transcendental realism to transcendental idealism. This touchstone serves as evidence within Kant's Copernican experiment, rather than as a consequence of the successful defense of transcendental idealism. This means that Kant's critique of metaphysics ought not be interpreted as the result of the unique philosophical project opened up by transcendental philosophy but instead as the essential and irreducible foundation of transcendental philosophy itself.

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Research keywords:
Critical Theory; Existentialism; Psychoanalysis; Democracy; Philosophy of Mind

Dissertation title:
The Unconscious, Drive and Desire in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

Dissertation abstract:
My dissertation explores and discusses the reception that psychoanalytic ideas have had in Anglo-Saxon philosophy. I thus deal with how Dewey, Russell, Wittgenstein, Habermas, Davidson, Rorty, Finkelstein, Johnston and others dealt with two main ideas of psychoanalysis: desire and the unconscious.

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Research keywords:
Phenomenology; Bergson; 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy

Dissertation title:
The Concept of Affect in the Philosophy of Henri Bergson

Dissertation abstract:
My dissertation examines the concept of affect in the work of Henri Bergson. It traces the appearance and changes of this concept through a consideration of his Essai, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution. Throughout, I show that affectivity is an essential concept for Bergson’s thought in that it plays a defining role for both consciousness and subjectivity in general. Affectivity is that which distinguishes a proper subject of experience from an impersonal, abstract subject of whom subjective experience can be spoken of but never accounted for. The former—the thoroughly affective subject—I locate in the Essai, while the latter is developed as the notion of affectivity changes in Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution. In exploring this change, my dissertation also posits a split in Bergson’s philosophical development which goes against Bergson’s own claims regarding the continuity in his work. My work sets up a contrast between the "early" Bergson of the Essai and the "later" Bergson of Creative Evolution. Matter and Memory is shown to have a somewhat ambivalent place between the two but is nevertheless categorized as part of the later Bergson. In this way, my dissertation is also a critique of Bergson’s later philosophy and a defense of what was developed in the Essai. In the end, I argue that Bergson’s later work failed to heed the warnings that he himself spelled out regarding the aims and motivation behind metaphysical thought and thus ended up with a philosophy which vitiated many of the key insights that the Essai first made possible. Further, by recovering one possible interpretation of Bergson’s early understanding of affectivity and its role for the living subject, I show that many of Bergson’s key insights can be saved from the various critiques deployed against his philosophy in the 20th century.

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Research keywords:
Political Philosophy; Critical Theory; Marxism; Trust

Dissertation title:
Critique of Conspirational Reason

Dissertation abstract:
My dissertation addresses the current proliferation of conspiracy theories and their political function. The dissertation is structured in two main parts. In the first part, I inquire into the nature of conspiracy theories by analyzing the crisis of liberal democracies. That analysis follows two main lines of argumentation. On the one hand, I provide an examination of the concept of trust and its role in modern political thought. Here I address the fundamental question of the conditions for trust and what it means to live in a distrust society. On the other hand, I address the crisis of liberal democracy through a political-psychological study of paranoia. Here I pursue an avenue opened up by Freud's seminal work on "mass psychology," carried further by Bataille, Reich, and Adorno, to think about the fascist personality. By interpreting the crisis of liberal democracy through the notions of (dis)trust and political paranoia, I offer an account of the origin and meaning of the currently pervasive mode of conspirational reason. In the second part of my dissertation, I focus on the awkward proximity between "critical theory" and "conspiracy theory." Conspiracy theories are critical enterprises in the sense that they attempt to unveil some injustice or evildoing. Similarly, critical theory has often been accused of being conspirational or even paranoiac. I address here the embarrassing question: What precisely distinguishes critique and conspiracy theorizing?

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