Teaching Fellows

Mat Messerschmidt received his PhD from the University of Chicago's interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought in 2022. His work often assumes the lens of “philosophy of religion,” and studies conceptualizations of secularization across disciplines in modernity. He focuses largely on Continental philosophy from Nietzsche through the 20th century. His dissertation’s title is The Guiding Thread of Modernity: Nietzsche’s Death of God as a Physiological Event. That study engaged the question, ‘What does it mean to bring philosophy “down to earth,” as so many in the 19th and early 20th century want to do?’ The dissertation argues that Nietzsche’s “physiology,” which studies the human being as a hierarchy of drives, is his answer to this question. As a Teaching Fellow in “Self, Culture, and Society,” Messerschmidt hopes to engage the same question as it is implicitly present in other thinkers, such as Marx and Freud.