Instructor of Philosophy
yates3cs@jmu.edu
Contact Info
Office: Cleveland Hall 309
Education:
M.A. in Theology, Regent College (Vancouver)
M.A. in Philosophy, University of Memphis
Ph.D. in Philosophy, Boston College
Dr. Yates specializes in 19th-20th century European Philosophy, and Aesthetics. His scholarly work focuses primarily on the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, the period of German Idealism, and intersections of these with currents in the visual and literary arts. He has been teaching at JMU since 2019, and in 2024 he received the Department of Philosophy and Religion's Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Continuing Adjunct.
He is the author of The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling (Bloomsbury, 2013) as well as scholarly articles on topics such as ontology, ethics, poetics, existentialism, and artists/writers such as Terrence Malick, Walker Percy, and Cormac McCarthy. He is also co-editor of Philosophy and the Return of Violence (Continuum, 2011). In addition to his role at JMU, Dr. Yates is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia.
Selected Publications:
"At the Threshold: Nature's Art of the Possible" in Hosting Earth: Facing the Climate Emergency, eds. Richard Kearney, Urwa Hameed, and Peter Klapes (Routledge, 2024).
"Sorting the Self: Assessments and the Cult of Personality," The Hedgehog Review (March 2024): 26:1.
"Richard Kearney, Terrance Malick, and the Hidden Life of Sense," in Richard Kearney and Anacarnation, eds. Brian Treanor and James Taylor (Routledge, 2022), pp. 145-162.
“The Loss of Longing in an Age of Curated Reality,” The Hedgehog Review (July 2019): 21:2.
“The Poetics of Lack and the Problem of Ground in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger,” in Somatic Desire: Recovering Corporeality in Contemporary Thought, eds. Sarah Horton, Stephen Mendelsohn, and Christine Rojcewicz, Lexington Books, 2019.
“Percy’s Poetics of Dwelling: The Dialogical Self and the Ethics of Reentry in The Last Gentleman and Lost in the Cosmos,” in Walker Percy: Philosopher, ed. Leslie Marsh, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018.
“Beyond Anthropologism: Derrida’s Heidegger and the Movement of Language,” in Hermeneutics-Ethics-Education, ed. Andrzej Wiercinski, Münster: LIT Verlag, 2015.
“Seams in the Desert: Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Ontology of Place,” Comparative and Continental Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 2, November 2014.
“Poetizing and the Question of Measure,” Studia Philosophiae Christianae Vol. 49, No. 4, 2013.
“Between Mourning and Magnetism: Derrida and Waldenfels on Hospitality,” in Phenomenologies of the Stranger, eds. Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch, Fordham, 2011.
