Dr. Christopher Lauer
Me with my wife Quyen and children Clancy and Iris. (They're the cute ones, and I'm the one having a miserable old time.)
About Me
Though still a relative newcomer to Hilo, I have made it my home. After growing up in Texas and Kansas, attending college and grad school in California, Pennsylvania, and Germany, I joined the faculty at UH Hilo in Fall 2011 to teach the department’s history of philosophy sequence (PHIL 211 and PHIL 213) and a mishmash of ethics classes. In the past few years, I have also begun teaching an evening philosophy course at Kulani Correctional Facility. My primary research interests are in German idealism and the ethics of recognition, and I recently completed a book on intimacy . Addressing such dimensions as gift-giving, physical touch, fetishes, irony, and mourning, the book argues that every demand for intimacy is contradictory in its very structure and yet that we should not relax into the deconstructive position that intimacy as such is impossible. The book draws widely on the philosophical tradition with a particular focus on recent French and German philosophy and also borrows some important insights from work in psychology, economics, anthropology, and sociology.
If you would like to submit an article to JPACT, please send it as a single, anonymized Word document to my email address.
Education
- B.A. in Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, 2001
- DAAD Scholar, Freiburg (Germany), 2004-5
- PhD in Philosophy, Penn State University, 2007