John Lysaker , Ph.D.

Professor of Philosophy

Profile

John Lysaker received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 1995. He is the author of You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense (Penn. State Press, 2002), an extended study of Heidegger’s poetics and various contemporary American poets, particularly Charles Simic. He is also the author of Emerson and Self-Culture (Indiana University Press, 2008), and the co-authored Schizophrenia and the Fate of the Self (Oxford University Press, 2008). The former defends Emerson's conception of self-cultivation while the latter tracks sense of self in schizophrenia and how it might be reclaimed in the wake of that devastating illness. He has also written on a wide range of philosophical and literary topics, including friendship in Derrida and Nietzsche, the political thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, and the critical aesthetics of Adorno. Professor Lysaker's teaching interests include 19th- and 20th-Century Continental Philosophy (increasingly, Kant to the present) as well as American Philosophy, with a focus on problems in aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and social theory. Recent courses of particular interest to comparative literature students include: the Pragmatics of Subjectivity in Nietzsche and Foucault; The Work of Art in Heidegger and Adorno; Emerson: The Essay as Praxis; and Topics in Critical Theory (e.g., Critical Social Theory; Hegel and Frankfurt School Theory; Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory).