Teaching Fellows

Michael Williams received a doctorate in History from the University of Chicago in 2022. His primary temporal and geographic field of interest is modern Germany, but his work spans a much greater expanse, lying at the intersection of the history of ideas, philosophy, and political theory. He explores questions of linguistic and existential meaning, truth, knowledge, mind, and being, as well as their ethical and political imbrications. Williams’ book-project is tentatively titled The Dangerous Perhaps: Truth, Meaning, and Political Justification in Twentieth-Century Germany. It traces the efforts of various thinkers to establish a philosophical foundation for a unified political theory through philosophies of truth and meaning. His article, “The Aporetic Humanism of Early Derrida,” appeared in the online platform of Philosophy and Social Criticism in May 2022 and will be published in a forthcoming print edition of the journal. Williams conceives of his intellectual project as the pursuit of timeless philosophical questions in a contextually sensitive, empirically rigorous, and intersubjectively responsible manner.