Wendell Kisner

I am developing an integration of the Hegelian dialectical method with phenomenological methodologies in a way that overcomes the latter’s dependence upon transcendental assumptions as well as the former’s formality and consequent disconnection with the variety and richness of human experience. Currently in its planning stages, this book length work will take up where my previous book left off by interpreting Hegel’s account of the emergence of human life from nature in terms of the middle voice (an idea developed in my previous book with respect to non-human life). I will argue that the unity of humanity with nature is not something to which we return through romantic nostalgia or exceptional experience, but rather is something we both achieve and reveal through careful systematic thought. This kind of approach yields a non-atomistic anthropocentrism which, rather than separating us from nature, demonstrates our unity with it while maintaining the irreducibility of the normative sphere to natural determinacies. In Hegel’s anthropology the phenomenological methodology becomes relevant insofar as the sphere of nature, a middle term in Hegel’s system between the sphere of logical determinacy and the sphere of normativity, is characterized by reflective determinacies, and it is first in and as nature that humanity emerges prior to its entrance into the political realm. It is expected that this work will draw upon Hegel and Plato as well as Marion and Levinas.

Wendell Kisner is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Program Director for the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies Program and has been teaching for over thirty years. His research and instructional interests include the texts of Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, Marion, Nietzsche, Plato, and Zizek, and topical areas of interest include ecological thought, philosophy of biology, phenomenology, hermeneutics, political philosophy, and interdisciplinary theory. He is author of Ecological Ethics and Living Subjectivity in Hegel's Logic: The Middle Voice of Autopoietic Life (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014). He lives in the Canadian Rockies and ventures into the mountains as often as possible to experience what Plato called the beginning of philosophy.