PhDs Available for Appointment

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Bfrazers@depaul.edu

Benjamin received his BA from the University of Colorado at Denver, where he studied Ancient philosophy and Spinoza. He earned his MA and Ph.D. from DePaul for his dissertation “A Discourse of the Non-Discursive in Plato and Pseudo-Dionysius. His primary interests are in Ancient philosophy, particularly Plato’s erotic dialogues, and mysticism. He also focuses on Continental philosophy, phenomenology, and the philosophy of religion.

Ben's research is in the field of Platonic philosophy. In his dissertation, he set out to study two figures in the tradition of Western thought who seem, at least at moments or under a certain interpretation, to be interested in a project of thinking precisely that which is beyond logic and the ordering power of language—Plato and Dionysius the Areopagite. He then shows how these earlier projects resonate with the projects of Heidegger, Bataille, and Derrida. Moving from the 4th century B.C.E. to (likely) the 7th  and then 20th centuries C.E., his dissertation is a very well-defined discussion of the same basic dynamic, how to bring the extra-discursive into discourse. Plato has recourse often to myth and erōs while Dionysius resorts to self-contradictory speech (the via negativa), while the 20th century thinkers with which he deals all exhibit similar tactics—Heidegger pushes philosophy toward poetry and tautological philosophical speech, Bataille into the literary, and Derrida into the modes of deconstructive analysis. Dealing ably with all of these figures and their logics of illogic, Ben is ultimately concerned with how we come together into something like a community or into a group obligated to one another in ethical ways when we find ourselves faced with that which frustrates our ability to articulate or understand it.    

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