www.shockwell.net
About Me and My Work
Short version: I am Professor of Philosophy and Director of Sustainability Studies at Indiana University South Bend. Most of my work has been on Martin Heidegger's project of fundamental ontology in and around Being and Time (1927), though I have roots and some lingering interests in early modern thought as well. My current and still very new project looks to draw on Hannah Arendt to help us think about what sort of collective (and, though I'm tired of the term, 'sustainable') future we can and should aspire to. This is in part an attempt to bring my philosophical background to bear on the issues I mostly teach about these days in my role in IUSB's Sustainability Studies program.
(If you're here looking for something more personal, I guess I can say that I like cats, music, food, beverages that go with food, growing things, and hanging out with my family, plus other stuff, too. And there are some things I dislike.)
Long version (of the work part): I received my BA with Distinction from the University of Virginia in 1996, completing a senior thesis with Jorge Secada on how in Descartes' thought will and intellect function together to establish the representational status of sensory experience. This is a specific case of the main philosophical question I have been wrestling with ever since: what the basic structures are of self and world, and how they are interrelated. It also awakened my interest in the question of what sort of philosophical methodology is required to investigate these structures – a central concern of the phenomenological tradition, which I’ve been drawn to since I first read Heidegger. After studying widely in both analytic and continental philosophy at U.Va. (Richard Rorty was still there, as were Robert Scharlemann (theology), and Allan Megill (intellectual history)), I began my PhD work at the University of Pittsburgh in 1997. I transferred after two and a half years to the University of Chicago, following John Haugeland in order to be able to work with him on Heidegger. Since my other main area of interest was early modern philosophy, this also let me take advantage of the presence of Dan Garber and Howard Stein. They together advised my “preliminary essay” on John Locke’s (proto-phenomenological) account of ideas that appear in multiple sensory modalities and their connection to ideas from the sense of touch. I argued this provides a pretty good empiricist basis for making claims about primary qualities in matter. This co-won the department’s prize for such essays, and it ended up being the basis for my first peer-reviewed publication. While I almost switched my dissertation plans to focus on Locke, I returned to Heidegger, completing my dissertation with Haugeland, though I’ve kept my early modern interests alive as well.
Since then I have been presenting papers, organizing conferences (the three-year Seminar in Phenomenology and the History of Philosophy [SIPHOP], co-run with Clinton Tolley and James Reid), giving talks, publishing essays (in e.g., Inquiry, European Journal of Philosophy, Ergo), and, most recently, completing a book, The Bounds of Self: An Essay on Heidegger’s Being and Time, which was published by Routledge last May (2021).
My work on Heidegger centers around the idea that his project of “fundamental ontology” circa Being and Time is best read as extending and revising an account of a priori knowledge and the sort of self-reflective method required to access it that in the modern period is begun by Descartes and carried to fruition in the critical philosophy of Kant. In the explicitly Kantian version of this that Heidegger develops, being is a generalization of what Kant identified as synthetic a priori knowledge of objects, and its production comes via the exercise of pure imagination (which in Being and Time Heidegger called “originary temporality”). The being of all entities thus originates in us, as we produce it in order to engage (whether practically or theoretically) with entities we are not (and with ourselves as well). On this “temporal idealist” view, the philosophical disclosure of being – ontology – itself turns out to be a particular kind of self-directed, imaginative activity, one that reproduces for explicit discursive articulation the always ongoing implicit activity of ontological production.
In working out the details of all of this, I challenge key aspects of the anti-Cartesian interpretive frame through which Heidegger is nearly always read, and I show him to be (in this early period at least) a deep and compelling systematic philosopher who seeks a universal account of the conditions of possibility of all intelligibility. My reading thus stands with and supports other readings in the analytic phenomenological tradition, which seek insight from Heidegger into structures of intentionality, being, and agency (e.g., Haugeland, Kris McDaniel, and Steven Crowell), but unlike most, I ground these insights in a methodologically subjectivist, transcendental framework (thus, my reading of Heidegger is much more Husserlian than most). I also challenge the trend among analytic Heideggerians of understanding being as a basic normative structure, which then allows me to argue that we should not try to find any practical import from fundamental ontology: if it is of value, it is of value for its own sake, not because it helps orient us in our concrete lives, either individually or collectively.
My new project on Arendt and what you might call the 'political philosophy of sustainability' starts from the question of what we would need to do in order to either revise or supplement Tim Jackson's use of Arendt in Post Growth if we took seriously what she says not just about labor and work but also about action and political action in particular. For Arendt argues that unless we strive to create and maintain a space in which we can appear to each other as free, unique individuals who are more than just laborers and workers, we will fail to fully realize our human selves. I'm both attracted by this thought but also see it as potentially problematic, at least in the way she develops it. If she's right, however, then it seems to me that most accounts of 'sustainability' (not just Jackson's) are missing the thing that we need most. Which then raises questions about how to fit all of the other, mostly perfectly reasonable sustainability goals into an Arendtian vision of human flourishing. Lots to do here, but working through all of this is what's going to occupy me for the next couple of years at least.
(If you're here looking for something more personal, I guess I can say that I like cats, music, food, beverages that go with food, growing things, and hanging out with my family, plus other stuff, too. And there are some things I dislike.)
Long version (of the work part): I received my BA with Distinction from the University of Virginia in 1996, completing a senior thesis with Jorge Secada on how in Descartes' thought will and intellect function together to establish the representational status of sensory experience. This is a specific case of the main philosophical question I have been wrestling with ever since: what the basic structures are of self and world, and how they are interrelated. It also awakened my interest in the question of what sort of philosophical methodology is required to investigate these structures – a central concern of the phenomenological tradition, which I’ve been drawn to since I first read Heidegger. After studying widely in both analytic and continental philosophy at U.Va. (Richard Rorty was still there, as were Robert Scharlemann (theology), and Allan Megill (intellectual history)), I began my PhD work at the University of Pittsburgh in 1997. I transferred after two and a half years to the University of Chicago, following John Haugeland in order to be able to work with him on Heidegger. Since my other main area of interest was early modern philosophy, this also let me take advantage of the presence of Dan Garber and Howard Stein. They together advised my “preliminary essay” on John Locke’s (proto-phenomenological) account of ideas that appear in multiple sensory modalities and their connection to ideas from the sense of touch. I argued this provides a pretty good empiricist basis for making claims about primary qualities in matter. This co-won the department’s prize for such essays, and it ended up being the basis for my first peer-reviewed publication. While I almost switched my dissertation plans to focus on Locke, I returned to Heidegger, completing my dissertation with Haugeland, though I’ve kept my early modern interests alive as well.
Since then I have been presenting papers, organizing conferences (the three-year Seminar in Phenomenology and the History of Philosophy [SIPHOP], co-run with Clinton Tolley and James Reid), giving talks, publishing essays (in e.g., Inquiry, European Journal of Philosophy, Ergo), and, most recently, completing a book, The Bounds of Self: An Essay on Heidegger’s Being and Time, which was published by Routledge last May (2021).
My work on Heidegger centers around the idea that his project of “fundamental ontology” circa Being and Time is best read as extending and revising an account of a priori knowledge and the sort of self-reflective method required to access it that in the modern period is begun by Descartes and carried to fruition in the critical philosophy of Kant. In the explicitly Kantian version of this that Heidegger develops, being is a generalization of what Kant identified as synthetic a priori knowledge of objects, and its production comes via the exercise of pure imagination (which in Being and Time Heidegger called “originary temporality”). The being of all entities thus originates in us, as we produce it in order to engage (whether practically or theoretically) with entities we are not (and with ourselves as well). On this “temporal idealist” view, the philosophical disclosure of being – ontology – itself turns out to be a particular kind of self-directed, imaginative activity, one that reproduces for explicit discursive articulation the always ongoing implicit activity of ontological production.
In working out the details of all of this, I challenge key aspects of the anti-Cartesian interpretive frame through which Heidegger is nearly always read, and I show him to be (in this early period at least) a deep and compelling systematic philosopher who seeks a universal account of the conditions of possibility of all intelligibility. My reading thus stands with and supports other readings in the analytic phenomenological tradition, which seek insight from Heidegger into structures of intentionality, being, and agency (e.g., Haugeland, Kris McDaniel, and Steven Crowell), but unlike most, I ground these insights in a methodologically subjectivist, transcendental framework (thus, my reading of Heidegger is much more Husserlian than most). I also challenge the trend among analytic Heideggerians of understanding being as a basic normative structure, which then allows me to argue that we should not try to find any practical import from fundamental ontology: if it is of value, it is of value for its own sake, not because it helps orient us in our concrete lives, either individually or collectively.
My new project on Arendt and what you might call the 'political philosophy of sustainability' starts from the question of what we would need to do in order to either revise or supplement Tim Jackson's use of Arendt in Post Growth if we took seriously what she says not just about labor and work but also about action and political action in particular. For Arendt argues that unless we strive to create and maintain a space in which we can appear to each other as free, unique individuals who are more than just laborers and workers, we will fail to fully realize our human selves. I'm both attracted by this thought but also see it as potentially problematic, at least in the way she develops it. If she's right, however, then it seems to me that most accounts of 'sustainability' (not just Jackson's) are missing the thing that we need most. Which then raises questions about how to fit all of the other, mostly perfectly reasonable sustainability goals into an Arendtian vision of human flourishing. Lots to do here, but working through all of this is what's going to occupy me for the next couple of years at least.