I do scholarly things

The year has begun officially for me. The amount of work I do now trumps any previous year but I, unsurprisingly, love it even more now. Anyway, despite being bogged down with Derrida and Plato's Theaetetus, I have determined that the time has come for me to begin to submit papers to conferences. That is, it is time for me to do scholarly things. So here, below, is my first paper proposal. I find it an interesting dilemma to think about given our current political climate and the identity politics that go along with it.

(On a side note: why are we not encouraged to ask great philosophical questions when the two candidates debate one another? What could be more needed than a mediation on the differences between the importance of judgment (Plato's Republic) and experience (Aristotle's Nicomachian Ethics Book 1)? I tend to side with Plato on the matter...but seriously, where's the questions about the importance of these "virtues")

Paper Proposal for Wesleyan Philosophical Society Conference 2009

Narrating Evil: Emplotment, Truth, and Human Suffering


The experience of evil and the human suffering caused in its wake lends itself to narration. The emplotment of these experiences serves as a basic human act which intends moving from a sense discordance to concordance; from disorder to the semblance of order. However, within this act of narration, one finds that the experience of a common life-world and the experience of interacting with the other creates the possibility of a conflict of interpretations regarding experiences of evil.
My question, then, is “what are we to do when narratives of evil and suffering come into conflict with one another and yet remain true?” Other, related questions might be “How do we account for the omission of acts of evil in certain narratives or the inclusion of innocent parties in evil actions?” and “What is the responsibility of the narrating subject to account for what would appear to be a conflicting or contradictory interpretation of the truth of events of evil?” My proposal for exploring this issue is to use the hermeneutic work of Paul Ricoeur as a guide for delimiting the act of narration and relation to conflicting notions of the truth of an event, determining the role of responsibility on the part of the narrator and the reader/hearer of such a narrative, and making a gesture towards a hermeneutics of narrativity that can account for both the suspicions and affirmations one might have concerning the truth of any story.



It would be nice, and terrifying, to get this accepted. But I hope I do.