Research

My research begins from a simple but far-reaching question: what happens when the relations through which we ordinarily understand others, inhabit the world, and make sense of our experience become themselves objects of reflection? I focus on moments in which what usually remains implicit—our criteria for knowledge, expression, understanding, and response—becomes uncertain, contested, or newly visible.

This question leads me to skepticism, but not primarily as a theoretical problem to be refuted or overcome. I approach skepticism as a form of relational problematization: a mode of reflection in which the conditions of our relations to others, the world, language, and ourselves become explicit. Such questioning is neither inherently destructive nor inherently emancipatory. It may expose assumptions that ordinarily pass unnoticed, reveal forms of exclusion or misplaced certainty, and create possibilities for criticism. It may also become a demand for forms of assurance that human relations cannot provide. The task, then, is not to decide in advance what skepticism means, but to distinguish its different forms and ask what they disclose, what they obscure, and what possibilities of response they open or foreclose.

A central part of this work concerns the relation between knowledge and acknowledgment. Our relations to other persons cannot be reduced either to evidence about inaccessible inner states or to an immediate and unmediated recognition of who they are. Interpretation, inference, and contextual judgment remain indispensable, but they do not exhaust what it means to respond to another person. A central question is when the demand for further knowledge enables more careful understanding and when it becomes a way of withholding response. Conversely, acknowledgment itself can become appropriative when it projects identities, intentions, or experiences onto others. The difficulty is to sustain responsiveness without imagining that another person can ever become fully transparent to us.

This problem is closely connected to moral attention. Following Iris Murdoch, I examine how moral life is shaped before explicit judgment or decision, through the ways in which people and situations become visible to us in the first place. Attention is never neutral: it is formed by desire, fear, fantasy, habit, and social categories, but it can also be cultivated through patience, imagination, and self-criticism. Reflective distance is therefore not simply opposed to responsiveness. In some contexts, distance is precisely what allows habitual or distorted ways of seeing to become available for criticism.

Aesthetic form is crucial to this inquiry because questions of relation are not only theoretical. They are perceptual, embodied, affective, and temporal. Literature and film do not merely illustrate philosophical claims; they organize experiences of proximity and distance, visibility and opacity, identification and estrangement. They direct attention, withhold information, make certain forms of suffering or expression perceptible, and expose the limits of interpretation. In this sense, aesthetic works can test the possibility of understanding others without turning understanding into possession or transparency.

Across these questions, I treat the ordinary neither as a secure foundation to which philosophy should simply return nor as something that critical reflection must leave behind. Ordinary practices of speaking, seeing, judging, trusting, and responding sustain intelligibility, but they may also reproduce exclusion, misrecognition, and unequal distributions of authority. Philosophy can make these forms of relation visible, clarify the assumptions that sustain them, and ask when they should be preserved, revised, or transformed.

At the broadest level, my work asks how we can acknowledge the limits of knowledge without allowing those limits to become grounds for indifference, and how we can remain responsive to others without denying their separateness, opacity, or capacity to resist our interpretations.