Bryan Richard

I am a doctoral student at the University of Guelph, Canada (working with Dr. John Russon). Broadly speaking, my philosophical outlook is directed and sustained by the basic phenomenological/existential insight that the meaningful individual human life is able to be itself only because it is always more than itself. To riff off the great Miles Davis, it seems one is always called on to 'play what's not there.' I take the primary task of philosophy to be the rational articulation of this (otherwise) strange situation and the crafting of a careful response to the interpretative demands that such a situation levies on us as we attempt to make ourselves at home in the world. My work is primarily directed toward how this can be accomplished at the intersection of metaphysics and practical philosophy. My dissertation takes a preliminary step with this work and attempts to develop a phenomenological and hermeneutical account of the essential links between the theoretical and practical dimensions of Kant's critical philosophy. I do this by working out what I take to be a distinctively Kantian account of the critical and philosophical genesis of (moral) orientation and insight.
Supervisors: John Russon, and John Hacker-Wright (Guelph), Michael Baur (Fordham)