My most recently published book is Anxiety & Wonder: on Being Human.

At times, we find ourselves unexpectedly immersed in a mood that lacks any clear object or identifiable cause. These uncanny moments tend to be hastily dismissed as inconsequential, left without explanation. I look into two such cases: wonder and anxiety – what it means to prepare for them, what life may look like after experiencing them, and what insights we can take from those experiences.
For Kierkegaard anxiety is a door to freedom, for Heidegger wonder is a distress that opens us to the truth of Being, and for Wittgenstein wonder and anxiety are deeply connected to the ethical. Drawing on themes from these thinkers and bringing them into dialogue, I argue that in our encounters with nothing we encounter the very potential of our existence. Most importantly, we confront what is most inconspicuous and fundamental about the human condition and what makes it possible to encounter anything at all: our distinct capacity for making sense of things.

My first book is Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: meaning and astonishment.

It brings together the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Lacan around their treatments of ‘astonishment,’ an experience of being struck by something that appears to be extraordinarily significant. Both thinkers have a central interest in the dissatisfaction with meaning that these experiences generate when we attempt to articulate them, to bring language to bear on them. I argue that this frustration and difficulty with meaning reveals a more fundamental characteristic of our sense-making capacities –their groundlessness. Instead of disappointment with language’s sense-making capacities,  Wittgenstein and Lacan can help us find in this revelation of meaning’s groundlessness an opportunity to acknowledge our own involvement in meaning, to creatively participate in it and thereby to enrich our forms of life with language.

I have won a research grant to write a new book on the Ethics of Fake Nature, and why experiencing real nature matters.

Here is a short summary of the project:

Fake nature has become increasingly present: from manmade islands to fake beaches and the NEOM plans for an artificial moon. At a time when salvaging what is left of earthly nature has become so important, the increase in fake nature projects looks like a baffling paradox. How are we to understand the fact that indoor ski resorts are being built in Dubai, while the Arctic icecap melts at a dangerous rate? Given the increasing presence of synthetic nature and the subsequent blurring of the line between the natural and the artificial, this project addresses the urgent question: what do we lose when we replace real nature with manmade copies? A growing number of studies shows a correlation between being in nature and finding well-being, but the precise character and value of ‘nature’ is unclear. How can we understand philosophically the link between nature and happiness? And once this link is appropriately understood, is there any reason to think that a well-made copy of nature couldn’t do the same work?

I have also edited a collection of papers on Cora Diamond’s distinctive approach to Ethics and its philosophical significance.

Cora Diamond on Ethics covers Diamond’s work on conceptual loss, moral theory, the category of the human, the moral consideration of animals, and the meaning of narcissism.

Including comparisons to the work of other contemporary moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, Jeff McMahan, Rai Gaita, Eva Kittay, Christine Korsgaard, and Edward Harcourt, the volume creates interdisciplinary links between Diamond’s work and other fields of study, including psychoanalysis and contemporary ethology.