Sean D. Kirkland

Sean was educated at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and also in Germany at the Bergische Universitaet, Wuppertal. His primary interest is in ancient Greek philosophy, but he also works in contemporary continental philosophy, specifically phenomenology. His monograph, The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Platos Early Dialogues, appeared in 2012 with SUNY Press. It won the 2013 Book of the Year award from Symposium, the journal of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy. He has recently completed two books. One, Heidegger's Destruction of Aristotle: On How to Read the Tradition, appeared with Northwestern University Press in July 2023. This study focuses on the destructive method introduced by Heidegger in the 1920's to be employed in the interpretation of traditionary texts, specifically those of Aristotle. The other, Aristotle and Tragic Temporality, has been accepted for publication by the University of Edinburgh Press in their Cycles series, which offers critical innovative readings of the history of philosophy. It will appear in the summer of 2024. This study focuses on human temporality (or the ontological structure underlying how human beings inhabit the present moment between a past and a future) as this features in Aristotle's Poetics and Ethics.​ ​ He is also at work on two projects relating to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. On the one hand, he is translating The Birth of Tragedy and all the unpublished essays, book projects, and fragments from the early period (1869-1873), for Volumes 1 and 10 of Stanford University Press's Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche series, along w​ith Andrew J. Mitchell (Emory University). He is also writing a monograph on one of those unpublished works, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, now under contract with Edinburgh University Press in their Critical Guides to Nietzsche series. Sean has also co-edited two collections of essays. The first is The Returns of Antigone: Interdisciplinary Essays, co-edited with Tina Chanter, and it appeared in 2014 with SUNY Press. The second, co-edited with Eric Sanday, is A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, and it appeared with Northwestern University Press in 2018. It presents a continental alternative to traditional primer volumes, the essays employing more textually focused interpretive approaches leading to fundamental insights rather than the synoptic summary statements one usually finds in such collections. Sean's work has appeared in various essay collections, including "Heidegger and Greek Philosophy" in The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger with Bloomsbury Publishing (eds. E. Nelson and F. Raffoul) and "Speed and Tragedy in Cocteau and Sophocles" in Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism with Oxford University Press (eds. S. E. Wilmer and A. Zukauskaite). Finally, he has published in a number of journals including Ancient Philosophy, Epoché, Research in Phenomenology, The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Continental Philosophy Review, the Bochumer philosophisches Jahrbuch für Antike und Mittelalter, and The Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium on Ancient Philosophy. Sean received the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Excellence