Profile

Professor Warnek is developing an interpretation of the Platonic dialogues which demonstrates how that text is engaged in a transformative appropriation of what the Greeks called physis. This question is opened through the themes of generation, degeneration and regeneration, and other related themes in the dialogues which concern sexual difference, birth and death, youth and aging, health, healing and sickness, community, friendship and filiation, and writing and the hearing repetition of the logos. At issue is the inception of the historical movement whereby physis is already on its way to becoming "nature," namely one region of possible inquiry over and against other regions. This interpretation of Plato also concerns itself with the hermeneutic problems involved in articulating and investigating such a question, given, on the one hand, the historical distance that separates us from the Greeks and, on the other hand, the decisive and commanding role they continue to play in the history of philosophy. The mythic dimension of the Platonic dialogues in this regard becomes especially important.

Professor Warnek's research also extends to other historical periods. He is interested in the reception of antiquity in German idealism and contemporary continental thought. The primary concern is the originally disclosive character of art and myth and how this relates to any possible philosophy of nature. Of special interest is Schelling's work on art, nature and mythology.

Translator: Martin Heidegger, German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) and the Philosophical Condition of the Present Age (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, Forthcoming).

Translator, with Walter Brogan: Martin Heidegger, Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1995).

"Reading Plato before Platonism (after Heidegger)," Research in Phenomenology, Vol. XXVI, 1996.

Charter member of the Ancient Philosophy Society and Program Committee Member (1998-present).

History of Philosophy, Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Hellenism, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Derrida, Metaphysics, Philosophy and Myth, Philosophy and Art, Concepts of Time and History, Philosophy and Medicine.

Fall 2012
PHIL 310 History of Philosophy: Ancient and Medieval
PHIL 350 Metaphysics

Winter 2013
PHIL 453/553 19th-Century Philosophers: Schelling

Spring 2013
PHIL 211 Existentialism 
PHIL 421/521 Ancient Philosophers: Plato