Christopher Sauder

Biography

Since arriving at DUC in 2015, I have come to enjoy teaching in an environment that thrives on philosophical discovery and that encourages professors and students to make connections between multiple philosophical traditions. I have found that DUC treats philosophy more as a conversation than solely as a formal academic discipline. Independently and in the context of my courses, I study models of movement, modality, matter, privation, negativity, temporality and moral evil in both the Platonist and Aristotelian traditions and the reception of these models in Heideggerian Phenomenology, German Idealism and Contemporary French Philosophy. I completed a Master’s degree at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, before continuing my studies in Europe, where I adopted a more historical approach to philosophy, dealing primarily with secondary literature in German and French. During my studies, I learned to move between the fields of ancient Greek philosophy and modern continental philosophy. My Ph.D. thesis on Hegel and Heidegger (forthcoming in a joint publication from the Presses de l’Université de Laval and J. Vrin in Paris) was carried out at Paris-IV, Sorbonne, under the direction of Prof. Jean-François Courtine. Comparisons of Hegel and Heidegger have always suffered from the problem of starting point: how to construct a legitimate dialogue between Hegel and Heidegger when the first relied on Kantian presuppositions and the second on Husserlian phenomenology ? In my thesis, titled Movements and Modalities: The Interpretation and Transformation of δυναμις and ενεργεια in the Philosophies of Hegel and Heidegger, I sought to circumvent this difficulty by using Aristotelianism to frame the terms of the debate and interpreting the differences between the two German philosophers as two possible alternatives within the peripatetic tradition. This line of work gave rise to a number of articles, book reviews and talks on Heidegger’s philosophy (Les jointures de la philosophie : Heidegger est-il un penseur systématique ? in : Qu'appelle -t-on la pensée? Le philosopher heideggérien, ed. C. Perrin, 2014 and “Machination et mobilisation: techno-nihilisme entre Friedrich Nietzsche et Ernst Jünger” in Lire les Beiträge, ed. A. Schnell, 2017). I am comfortable working in various currents of the Greek philosophical tradition: my first project examined formal ontological structures in an Aristotelian register and my more recent work deals with paradigms of moral evil in the Platonic tradition, especially in the thought of Plotinus. So far I have presented certain elements of this project at conferences and colloquia: (“The Difference Between the Dualisms of Plutarch and Numenius," International Society for Neo-Platonic Studies (ISNS), Buenos Aires, 2015), ("Providence and Gnosticism from Ennead 33 (II.9) to Enneads 47-48 (III.2-3)," Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy (SAGP), New York, 2016), and (“Das Problem des Bösen und das Dilemma des Dualismus: Zu Proklos’ Kritik an Plotin in De malorum subsistentia”, University of Heidelberg, 2017).

Research Interest

Heideggerian Phenomenology, German Idealism and Contemporary French Philosophy.