Toronto Metropolitan University
Philosophy
This paper shows that Hegel's ontology of living beings provides us with indispensable conceptual resources for making sense of his account of the ontology of human action. For Hegel, living bodies are ontologically distinct in that their... more
In this paper, one of Merleau-Ponty’s distinctive contributions to the phenomenological conception of the link between time and agency is explored: namely, his attempt to identify a form of agency—that of our standing dispositions—that... more
Hegel's specifi c interpretation of burial rituals in the Phenomenology is an important part of his general understanding of the development of human freedom and of spirit. For Hegel, freedom is not something immediately given, but... more
In this paper it is argued that the conceptions of embodied meaning and of intuition that Hegel appeals to in the Aesthetics anticipate some of Merleau-Ponty’s insights concerning the distinctive character of pre-conceptual, sensuous... more
It is argued that one of Hegel's main strategies in overcoming the opposition between nature and spirit is to recognize a realm of "spiritualized nature" that has a distinctive ontological character of its own, one that,... more
Emotion has often been conceived, both within philosophy and without, as a force that opposes itself to reason and, correspondingly, to one’s autonomy. This impression that emotion is irrational and at odds with autonomy is, I contend,... more
Emotion is usually conceived as playing a relatively external role in education: either it is raw material reshaped by rational practices, or it merely motivates intellectual reasoning. Drawing upon the philosophy of Hegel and Plato’s... more
Against recent claims that infants begin with a sense of themselves as distinct selves, I propose that the infant’s initial sense of self is still indeterminate and ambiguous, and is only progressively consolidated, beginning with... more