BIO

Bryan Smyth received his PhD in philosophy from McGill University in 2006 after previously studying at the University of Waterloo, as well as at Karl-Franzens-Universität and Université Paris I. He held visiting positions at Mount Allison University and the University of Memphis before coming to the University of Mississippi in 2013. His research interests deal primarily with Critical Theory (broadly construed), phenomenology (especially the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty), and areas of philosophical complementarity between these traditions. He is particularly interested in questions concerning the relation between nature and history, and how such questions relate to the normative grounds of social critique and the possibility of transformative historical agency. The goal is to make sense of such agency, along with the normative motivations behind it, in robustly embodied terms, and among other things this has led Smyth to explore aspects of ethical habit, including ‘heroism’ in the sense of prereflective ethical exemplarity, and how this may bear upon practical questions concerning effective leadership and social solidarity.