PhD Completed

Good news: I successfully defended my PhD dissertation from Rice University. I hope to turn it into a full-length book in the near future. Here’s the abstract.

Outside: The Philosophical Methods of Nick Land

Abstract

This dissertation argues that Nick Land’s philosophical project involves two pairs of contradictions: he is a scientific esotericist, and a Kantian Nietzschean. However, this is not a straightforward synthesis of opposites, nor a completely successful one. Land’s core motivation comes from his esoteric insights about the future, but he often frames them in a way that is amenable to a scientific age. Philosophically, he inherits the transcendental framework from Kant, and the insistence on nature from Nietzsche. Land is left with a transcendentalism that is esoterically porous to the outside, and a vision of nature that rejects human morals in favor of an absolute valuing of intelligence regardless of embodiment.