PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Transcription

1 CURRICULUM VITAE Matthew R. Wester Department of Philosophy 4237 TAMU, Texas A&M University College Station, TX, Voice: August 2018 Areas of Specialization: Social and Political Philosophy, History of Philosophy Areas of Competence: Aesthetics, 20 th Century European Philosophy, Philosophy and Literature, Political Theory, 19 th Century German Philosophy Teaching Concentrations: Introductory Formal Logic, Applied Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, History of Philosophy EDUCATION Ph.D. Texas A&M University, 2018 Field: Philosophy M.A. Texas A&M University, 2016 Field: Political Science M.A. Miami University (Ohio), 2012 Field: Philosophy B.A. Texas A&M University, 2009 Field: Philosophy, Psychology PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Lecturer, Texas A&M University (August 2018-present) Instructor of Record, Texas A&M University ( , August 2017-May 2018) Graduate Teaching Assistant, Texas A&M University ( , Spring 2017) Graduate Teaching Assistant, Miami University ( ) COURGES TAUGHT

2 1. Social and Political Philosophy PHIL 332 (Fall 2017) 2. Introduction to Philosophy PHIL 251 (Summer 2016, Spring 2018) 3. Introduction to Logic PHIL 240 (Summer 2014, Summer 2015) 4. Contemporary Moral Issues PHIL 111 (Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Fall 2018) COURSES ASSISTED 1. Introduction to Logic PHIL 240 (Texas A&M) 2. Society and the Individual PHIL 103 (Miami University) 3. Problems of God and Religion PHIL 211 (Miami University) 4. Modern Philosophy PHIL 302 (Miami University) 5. Existential Themes in Modern Literature PHIL 105 (Miami University) PAPER PRESENTATIONS 1. Nietzsche s Defense of Selfishness. Miami University English Graduate Student and Adjunct Association Symposium (MEGAA), Oxford, Ohio, March Solidarity and Reflective Judgment. Arendt Circle, Cleveland, Ohio, April Carl Schmitt s Critique of Parliamentary Democracy and Nietzsche s Critique of Christianity. Graduate Research Forum, Oxford, Ohio, November Solidarity and Judgment: Politics and World. American Philosophical Association (RPA Sponsored Panel), Chicago, Illinois, February Nietzsche s Apocalyptic Politics. Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy, College Station, Texas, May Political Dimensions of Eternal Return. The Friedrich Nietzsche Society, Cork, Ireland, October The Banality of Evil as Reflective Judgment. The North Texas Philosophical Association, Denton, Texas, February 2014.

3 8. Before Adolf Eichmann: A Kafkian Analysis of the Banality of Evil. Arendt Circle, College Station, Texas, April the Law and the Banality of Evil. Literature and the Law, New York, New York, October The Origin and Development of Hannah Arendt s Theory of Judgment. Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy, College Station, Texas, May The Denktagebuch and Hannah Arendt s Theory of Judgment. Association for Political Theory, Columbus, Ohio, October On the Problem of Self-Knowledge in Kafka s der Process. On Trial: Kafka and Philosophy, College Station, Texas, April Beyond Truth and Goodness: Arendt s Theory of Political Judgment. Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy, Los Angeles, California, June Reading Kant Against Himself: Arendt s Appropriation of the erweiterte Denkungsart. Critical Theory Today: Arendt and Critical Theory, Oldenburg, Germany, July Correcting Kant: Arendt and the Appropriation of Kant s third Critique. Forthcoming at the Arendt Circle, Davis, CA, April JOURNAL ARTICLES 1. Reading Kant Against Himself: Arendt s Appropriation of the erweiterte Denkungsart, forthcoming in Arendt Studies. AWARDS AND HONORS Manuel Davenport Prize for Best Undergraduate Essay in Philosophy (2009) Summertime for Advancement in Research (S.T.A.R.) Award (2017) Murray and Celeste Fasken Graduate Student Teaching Award (2018) PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS American Philosophical Association (APA)

4 Association for Political Theory (APT) Arendt Circle Friedrich Nietzsche Society (FNS) Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy REFERENCES Daniel W. Conway, Professor of Philosophy, Texas A&M University Claire Katz, Professor of Philosophy, Texas A&M University Kristi Sweet, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Texas A&M University DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Judgment and its Limits: Eichmann, Modernity, and the Development of Hannah Arendt s Theory of Political Judgment My dissertation comprises a sympathetic examination of Hannah Arendt s evolving account of political judgment. A fresh look at this topic is necessary not only because she died before completing it, but also because her account of the faculty of judgment is a crucial component of her critique of politics in the contemporary world. If we are to appreciate fully her characterizations, e.g., of the dark times of late modernity, or the banality of evil, we would do well to understand her account of the promise and limitations of political judgment. My research reveals the developmental trajectory of Arendt s thinking on judgment. Many commentators have noted a dramatic shift in her thinking following her attendance at Adolf Eichmann s trial. Some scholars (such as Richard Bernstein) have argued that Arendt s account of the faculty of judgment ought to be understood in terms of two mutually exclusive models. Others (such as Dana Villa) have pushed back against this interpretive tendency, and have downplayed the theoretical tension between the two ways that Arendt wrote about the faculty of judgment. Prior to Eichmann s trial, Arendt ascribed political

5 judgment to political actors participating in the public sphere of politics. However, after encountering Eichmann in the flesh, she shifted to attributing political judgment to uninvolved spectators. To date no one has explained or accounted for the genesis of this shift. In my dissertation, I explain the shift, reckon its costs and benefits, and defend the validity of the spectator model that emerges. In so doing, I demonstrate that the post-eichmann shift in her thinking on judgment reflects a significant development of her critical orientation towards modernity. Specifically, I show that both her controversial analysis of Eichmann s trial and the development of her engagement with Kant s Third Critique reveal a deep concern with a widespread, self-inflicted atrophy of political judgment. In late 1957, Arendt identified Kant s account of judgment as the best and most representative account of how individuals may register their interest and participation in politics. Yet this account of judgment is flawed in ways that make it ill-suited to the unique conditions of politics in late modernity. The withering away of political institutions and political participation in large First World representative democracies meant that her earlier actor model of judgment was of limited relevance. She thus attempted to correct Kant s account of judgment so that it becomes more directly relevant for the distinctive problems of modern politics. Her key contribution is the shift from an actorcentered model, in which political judgment is an activity undertaken by politically involved actors, to a spectator-centered model, in which judgment is an activity undertaken by uninvolved and critical spectators. The merit or value of Arendt s intervention is most obviously displayed in her critical assessment of the Eichmann trial, which alerted her to a widespread crisis in judgment in the modern world. Many central characteristics of her later account of judgment (such as the distanced and uninvolved perspective from which judgment proceeds) appear in her criticism of Eichmann s trial. To Arendt, the failings of Eichmann s trial (such as its conspicuous failure to generate a valid precedent for a new criminal and a new crime) suggested a far more widespread and disturbing phenomenon of an unwillingness and reluctance to carry out political judgment when it was most needed. She viewed the failure of the Eichmann trial as particularly alarming because trial by jury relies upon judgment in order to apply valid precedent. In cases where there is no valid precedent, judgment must proceed on its own and generate a new precedent and a valid judgment simultaneously. Her diagnosis of Eichmann as thoughtless has been the subject of much scholarly commentary, but the degree to which her critique of Eichmann actually informed a much larger criticism of the functioning of modern political institutions has not been noticed. My research suggests that Arendt s judgment of the spectator was her recognition that in the dark times in which she wrote, valid political judgment was rare and extra-institutional, the prerogative of individuals who were not involved in the events they judged. The heated controversy elicited by her

6 commentary on Eichmann s trial convinced Arendt that modern individuals were increasingly unable or unwilling to exercise judgment at all. In defending this thesis, I make two original contributions to the scholarship on Arendt. First, my research places into historical context many of the supposed inconsistencies in Arendt s texts on judgment. Most of the commentary has suggested that her two accounts of judgment are either complementary or mutually exclusive. My analysis is among the first treatments of this topic to be grounded in Arendt s untranslated notebooks, which, I demonstrate, offer important insights into her initial reasons for turning to Kant s Third Critique. Second, I show that Arendt s post-eichmann account of judgment confirms that she came to think that the atrophy of the faculty of judgment was consensual, both in Eichmann s case and more generally. Her criticism of the Eichmann trial contains a powerful, but as yet unappreciated indictment of the unwillingness of those involved to form a valid judgment of both the crime and the criminal at stake. In order to bring out these neglected dimensions of Arendt s analysis of the Eichmann trial, I develop an original interpretation of Kafka s The Trial, and I demonstrate that the court in Jerusalem was before Eichmann in the same way as the man from the country was before the Law in Kafka s famous parable.