Research

I am interested in questions of what appears to us as “natural” and what appears to be the product of human activity and influence. Denaturalizing what are in fact the effects of changeable human practices has long been a tool in many critical philosophies, used by thinkers to challenge the “naturalness” of a given economic and political system, of sexual and racial hierarchies, and the relationship among all these things.
Alongside this useful critical operation, I am curious about other uses of the term “nature,” especially in contemporary environmental philosophy, and what is valuable in still calling ourselves “natural.” In keeping with thinkers from Frankfurt School critical theory, ecological feminism, and non-Western traditions, I explore configurations of our ethical attachments and predominant ethical frameworks while challenging a strict dualism between nature and human activity. This line of questioning leads me to reconceive standard accounts of aesthetic experience and the role of aesthetic experience in our ethical lives, particularly in relation to the more-than-human world.

Publications

“Adorno and Ecofeminist Ethics,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy [SPEP Special Issue] 37, no. 3 (2023): 356-368.

“Contingency and Historical Inevitability,” in The Routledge Companion to History and Theory. Ed. Chiel van den Akker. London: Routledge, 2022: 199-214.

“Dolphins in Venice: On Nature, Revenge, and Beauty,” Philosophy World Democracy 1, no. 1 (2021): https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/dolphins-in-venice.

“Faith and Freedom: Kant at the Boundary of Reason,” in The Court of Reason: Proceedings of the 13th International Kant Congress. Eds. Beatrix Himmelmann and Camilla Serck-Hanssen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021: 1959-1967.

“Adorno, Benjamin, and Natural Beauty ‘On This Sad Earth,’” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 34, no. 2 (2020): 159-178.

In Progress

A monograph titled Figurations of Nature in Adorno

A monograph tentatively titled Ecofeminist Aesthetics

An invited chapter titled “Who’s Afraid of Earth-Beings? Witches, Shamans, and Capitalism” on Silvia Federici, Marisol de la Cadena, and unrepresentable relations to nature

An invited article on Walter Benjamin, spatiality, and nature

For links to published works, please see: https://pomona.academia.edu/JordanDaniels