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Peter A. Warnek

Associate Professor of Philosophy
Philosophy
warnek@uoregon.edu
Office: 246 Susan Campbell Hall, 1295 University Of Oregon, Eugene OR 97403-1295
Office Hours: Fall 2023: Tuesdays, 2-3 pm; Thursdays, 11 am -12 pm.
Research Interests: Ancient Philosophy, 19th-20th Century Continental Philosophy, Kant, Philosophy of Nature, Myth, Tragedy, History of Philosophy
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Research

Professor Warnek's main areas of research are divided between ancient Greek philosophy and 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, beginning with Kant. He is currently working on two books, a commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and a monograph on responsibility. The reading of Aristotle challenges prevailing interpretations of the Greek understanding of logos. In particular, this work focuses upon the way in which Aristotelian logos is always constituted in a necessarily affective and receptive relation to the world. This interpretation of Aristotole, since it concerns our understanding of human agency, is related to the work on responsibility. The second book, What Calls For Responsibility?, develops an original interpretation of the experience of responsibility over and against its prevailing historical conceptions, especially as these are tied to accounts of human freedom. Responsibility emerges here not as a function or consequence of freedom but as an original event from which freedom is to be understood.

Publications

Book: Descent of Socrates: Self-Knowledge and Cryptic Nature in the Platonic Dialogues. Indiana University Press, 2005.

Representative publications:

"The 'Unbearable Excess' of Diabolical Evil in Žižek's reading of Schelling," Comparative and Continental Philosophy, forthcoming.

"On the Ground of Images: Sacred Dogs and Monstrous Truth," Research in Phenomenology, 49.1, forthcoming.

"Platonic Displacements and the Strange Appearance of Socrates," Kronos: Philosophical Journal, Vol. 5, 2016, 111-142.

"Prolegomena to Monstrous Philosophy or Why it is Necessary to Read Schelling Today." Comparative Continental Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 1, May, 2014.

"Fire from Heaven in Elemental Tragedy: From Hölderlin's Death of Empedocles to Nietzsche's Dying Socrates." Research in Phenomenology, 44, 2014.

"The Experience of Freedom at the Limits of Reflection in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology." Chiasmi International, No 15, 2013. 

"Bastard Reasoning in Schelling's Freiheitsschrift." Epoché. A Journal in the History of Philosophy, 13, no. 2, 2009.

"Once more... for the first time:  Aristotle and Hegel in the Logic of History," Research in Phenomenology, 34, 2004.

"Translating Innigkeit: The Belonging Together of the Strange," in Heidegger and the Greeks, ed. Drew Hyland and John Manoussakis, Indiana University Press, 2004. 

"Reading Schelling after Heidegger: The Freedom of Cryptic Dialogue," in Schelling Now, ed. Jason Wirth, Indiana University Press, 2004.

"Teiresias in Athens: Socrates as Educator and the Kinship of Physis in Plato's Meno," Epoché. A Journal in the History of Philosophy, 7, no. 2, Spring 2003.

"Saving the Last Word: Heidegger and the Concluding Myth of Plato's Republic," Philosophy Today (Fall, 2002).

Teaching

History of Philosophy, Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Hellenism, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Derrida, Zizek, Metaphysics, Philosophy and Myth and Tragedy, Philosophy and Art, Concepts of Time and History, Philosophy and Medicine, Philosophy of Religion.