What does it mean to say that one ‘ought’ to undergo an emotion? In The Imperative of Responsibility, Hans Jonas provocatively asserts that 20th-century citizens ‘ought’ to fear for the well-being of future generations. I argue that Jonas’ demand is not straightforwardly reducible to claims about the fittingness, expedience, or aretaic desirability of fear, and I present an interpretation of its content and coherence using Aristotle’s moral psychology of fear in the Rhetoric, Politics, and Nicomachean Ethics as a framework. Aristotle’s account of fear as an anticipatory, imaginative stance that alters perception and judgment helps to clarify that Jonas’ demand concerns acts of affect-laden, imaginative reflection through which one might revise one’s affective sensibilities with regard to future persons. I conclude by considering several objections to Jonas’ first-order argument, and indicating several clarifications and caveats that are important for formulating strong normative assertions about political emotions more generally. (Forthcoming, Southern Journal of Philosophy)

The study of hermeneutical injustice tends to restrict the category of ‘hermeneutical resources’ to discursive resources: words, concepts, and expressive styles. This article foregrounds a diverse set of nondiscursive hermeneutical resources, including embodied skills, habits, comportments, and dispositions, and argues that such resources are vitally important for theorizing self-interpretive dysfunction. I reconstruct four accounts of gendered embodiment from Nancy Tuana, Bat-Ami Bar On, Iris Marion Young, and Simone de Beauvoir, and I argue that each implicitly treats embodied practices, comportments, and dispositions as hermeneutical resources. I also consider several implications of and objections to incorporating non discursive hermeneutical resources into the study of hermeneutical injustice, and argue that doing so complicates standard accounts of the relationship between hermeneutical injustice and epistemic injustice. (Forthcoming, Hypatia)

This paper investigates the moral emotion of being socially, but non-agentially connected to a harm. I propose understanding the emotion of an affiliated onlooker as a species of regret called ‘social-regret’. Breaking from existing guilt- and shame-based accounts, I argue that social-regret can be a fitting, expressive, and revelatory reactive attitude that opens the way for deliberation over accountability for others’ harms. When we feel social-regret, our attention is directed towards the moral salience of our social relations and the expectations that undergird them, as well as possibilities for ameliorative action. I consider several existing accounts of affiliated onlookers’ emotions (including embarrassment, guilt, and shame), and I highlight the advantages of supplementing these with a regret-based account. Social-regret provides a novel way to understand negative, self-directed emotions in response to others’ harms as rational, expressive, and potentially reason-giving experiences. (2024, Philosophy 99 (2): 247-271.)

I confront the ‘accountability problem’ of Iris Marion Young’s theory of forward-looking responsibility, which arises when we seek to hold others accountable for failing to act on shared forward-looking responsibilities to intervene upon structural injustice. The accountability problem is that many people bear large numbers of forward-looking responsibilities simultaneously, such that it is inevitable that one falls short of at least some (if not most) of them. Solving the accountability problem has significant stakes for the wide body of literature that relies on Young’s social connection model. I reconstruct four strategies for circumventing the accountability problem, and ultimately endorse the view that we can understand negligence of forward-looking responsibilities in terms of moral laxity for imperfect duties. Judgments of moral laxity provide a coherent way to hold serial shirkers accountable without overlooking the cumulative demandingness of forward-looking responsibilities. (Forthcoming, Social Theory and Practice)

Although Arendt is widely cited as an early proponent of what is sometimes called “forward-looking” or “future-looking” responsibility, scholars have not dwelled at length on Arendt’s claim that the experience of thaumazein – in her view, a form of wonder intermixed with horror – can serve as the impetus for taking on expansive political responsibilities. This article reconstructs an implicit theory of wonder from Arendt’s numerous references to thaumazein, and subsequently develops an account of thaumazein as an affective, enabling condition for revising the scope of one’s responsibilities. Connecting Arendtian thaumazein to contemporary scholarship on the role of wonder and emotion in politics, I argue that thaumazein is a distinctive emotion with both political and existential salience, and that it can prompt those who experience it to scrutinize and reimagine inherited conceptual and political frameworks, including moral and legal frameworks for responsibility. (2022, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 53 (3): 261–275.)

This paper situates Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality between the rival concerns of Habermasian critical theory and Gadamerian hermeneutical philosophy. I argue that natality is simultaneously emancipatory and hermeneutically grounded. This is to say that Arendt affirms the possibility of reflectively disrupting precedents set by tradition, even as she refrains from overestimating the emancipatory powers of critical reflection. Through comparison with Habermas and Gadamer, it emerges that Arendt conceives of repetition and revolution as jointly constitutive of human natality. At bottom, natality is not simply an innate capacity for newness, but rather refers to the site of an irreducible confrontation between past and future. (2022, Arendt Studies 6: 119–138.)

In order to revise interpretive prejudgments, it is important to first recognize them for what they are. Problematically, the habitual overreliance on deficient prejudgments can make such recognition difficult. An impasse appears: How can one intervene on deficient interpretive resources if those very same resources conceal their deficiencies? I analyze James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” in which the protagonist Gabriel is highly resistant to internalizing experiences that might otherwise prompt him to revise his interpretive projections. I argue that Gabriel only becomes aware of his interpretive shortcomings after an experience of profound hesitation that allows him to affectively sense the limitations of his prejudice. Drawing from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kristie Dotson, and Alia Al-Saji, I argue that Gabriel’s experience of hesitation temporarily denaturalizes his deeply entrenched sexism, circumventing the hermeneutical impasse described above. Read in this way, “The Dead” illustrates the power of affective experiences to unsettle highly resilient ways of seeing the world. (2021, Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (1):153–164.)

I propose that Hannah Arendt’s hermeneutical philosophy can make important contributions to ongoing debates in the study of epistemic injustice. Building on Kristie Dotson’s concern that Miranda Fricker’s formulation of hermeneutical injustice is needlessly restrictive, I argue that Arendt’s concept of ‘thinking’ challenges us to imagine a form of hermeneutical virtue that is rigorously self-critical. The self-destructive tendency of Arendtian thinking may help to guard against the specific danger that Dotson identifies - namely, that an overly rigid approach to hermeneutical injustice and hermeneutical virtue can itself generate situations of epistemic injustice. Despite important differences that emerge, it is productive to bring together Fricker’s concept of hermeneutical virtue and Arendt’s concept of self-undermining thinking in order to reveal the ways in which these two corrective strategies might enrich and pose important challenges for the other. (2020, Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (1): 21–34.)

This chapter analyzes the 1987 adaptation of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” into film by John Huston. I read Joyce’s story as an act of furta sacra (holy theft), a medieval practice of secretly relocating saintly relics. I show that Joyce’s original story is a retelling of Nora Barnacle’s real-life childhood romance in which Joyce renames and relocates Nora’s lover, Michael Bodkin. In my reading, “The Dead” is not only about the lingering power that the dead hold over the living, but also the practices by which the living preserve memories of the dead through revisionist storytelling. Huston’s adaptation provides yet another link in this complicated series of retellings and transformations. (Thinking Film: Philosophers Go to the Movies, edited by Richard Kearney and M. E. Littlejohn (London: Bloomsbury Press), 2023)