Michael Barr
Ph.D. Student
Philosophy
Education: Ph.D. Stony Brook University (In Progress) • M.A. in (Philosophy and the Arts), Stony Brook University (2022) • M.A. in (English Literature), State University of New York at Buffalo (2019) • B.A. in (English), Ohio Wesleyan University (2018)
Areas of Specializaton: Artificial Intelligence, the Pittsburgh School, American Pragmatism
After wrapping up an M.A. in English and realizing that he was less interested in literary history than in literary theory, Michael took refuge in the Philosophy department at Stony Brook University, where he completed his M.A. in 2022 and began his Ph.D. in 2023. Though sprawling, his research interests have since narrowed over the past several years to topics that are well represented in Harriman Hall—namely, American pragmatism and phenomenology. Currently, he is beginning work (he swears!) on a dissertation that uses Wilfrid Sellars to discuss the sentience that all mammals display, the sapience that us human mammals display, and how to distinguish between the two in a way that makes sapient, rational activity a criteria that any being—human, animal, A.I. or otherwise—can satisfy. Following figures like Ray Brassier and Peter Wolfendale, the idea here is that to avoid contingently attaching rationality to a being, we have to stop thinking of it as a hardware that comes prepackaged for us beings, and instead consider it as a sort of software that can, in principle, at least, be downloaded and installed by any.
Research Interests: Wilfrid Sellars, Reza Negarestani, Continental/Analytic Divide, Phenomenology
Selected Publications
- Robert W. Luzecky and Daniel W. Smith, eds. Deleuze and Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2023. 280 pp.
- PLATO’S EXCEPTIONAL CITY, LOVE, AND PHILOSOPHER. By Nickolas Pappas. London & NY: Routledge, 2020. 302 pp.
- BUDDHIST ETHICS: A PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATION. By Jay L. Garfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 249 pp.
- AESTHETIC DIMENSIONS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. By Andrew Bowie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 296 pp.
Recent Presentations
- Podcast: Authors die Twice, with Bryan Counter and Nathan Wainstein. “Oikospiel: The Twin Snakes feat. Michael Barr”