Stephen Watson

Stephen Watson is Professor of Philosophy and has published ten books and over fifty articles on figures and topics in Aesthetics, the History of Philosophy and Recent Continental philosophy. He has lectured in a variety of settings both in North America and Europe. His graduate work was undertaken at Duquesne University, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Louvain, Belgium. He is a former Executive Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, a former Chair of Notre Dame’s Philosophy Department and has served on a number of committees for the American Philosophical Association. His recent teaching has included courses covering topics in Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Post-Structuralism and Aesthetics.

Representative Publications

•  “Hermeneutics and the Retrieval of the Sacred: Hegel’s Giotto (with an Eye Toward Mark Rothko’s),” The Review of Metaphysics, 72, June 2019
• “Paul Klee, ‘The Limits of Reason’ and the Music of Metaphysics”, Exhibition Catalogue, The Construction of Mystery, ed. Oliver Kase, Pinakotek der Moderne, Műnchen. Műnchen: Hirmer Verlag/ University of Chicago Press: 2018
• “Montaigne’s Of Cruelty and the Emergence of Hermeneutic and Intercultural Modernity: Three Rival Readings (Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Horkheimer,” The Journal of Chinese Philosophy (Special Supplement on Intercultural Hermeneutics), (2017).
• “On the Metamorphoses of Transcendental Reduction:” Merleau-Ponty and the Adventure of Constitutive Analysis”, in Essays in Honor of Jacques Taminiaux ed. Vernique Foti et al. (Berlin: Springer, 2017).
• “Van Gogh and the Absence of the Work: Remarks on a Hermeneutic Itinerary” in Van Gogh Among the Philosophers, ed. David Nichols (New York: Lexington, 2017)