Current Research
My research focuses on the relationship between social interpretation and political community. Drawing from the resources within the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics and phenomenology, I argue that social interpretation is generative of political community. This means that community is not based on aspects of social life that happen to be held in common, but on social practices of interpretation about what is held in common. This means, further, that the conditions for social interpretation are also the conditions for political community. If these conditions deteriorate, so does political community itself.
In my current project, I pursue this question within the political theory of Hannah Arendt. In my dissertation, “Hermeneutics of the Polis: Arendt and Gadamer on the Political World,” I drew on philosophical hermeneutics to flesh out the role of the phenomenological concept of ‘world’ in Arendt’s work. Now I am adapting this research into a monograph titled Arendt and the Crisis of the Political World. This project presents a novel systematic account of Arendt’s political and philosophical thought with respect to the question of political community and its relationship to social interpretation.