Andrew Cutrofello, PhD

Professor

Welcome to my Loyola homepage! I've been teaching at Loyola since 1994. I did my graduate work at Northwestern, where I had the good fortune to work with John McCumber. Over the years my research and teaching have clustered around three interrelated topics: the nature and significance of Kant's critical project, the genesis and stakes of the analytic/continental divide, and the relation between philosophy and poetry. Early in my career I wrote a "sequel" to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Recently, I wrote a book about sequels to Plato's Parmenides, among which I include both Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel's Science of Logic.

In the dialectical exercise of Plato's Parmenides, Parmenides examines two hypotheses: "If the One is" and "If the One is not." From each he derives paradoxical consequences both for the One itself and for "the Others." In The One and the Others: Metaphysics, Poetry, and the Antinomies of Plato's "Parmenides," I argue that Kant and Hegel complete this exercise by introducing two new hypotheses: "If the Others are" and "If the Others are not." Kant's Copernican turn amounts to a bracketing of hypotheses of the One in favor of the novel hypothesis "If things are other than our representations of them," or, in Plato's terms, "If the Others are." I justify this reading on the basis of parallels between Kant's construal of Hume's challenge to metaphysics and what Plato calls the Greatest Difficulty (aporia) for the theory of forms. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel negates Kant's Copernican hypothesis, enabling him to hypothesize "If the Others are not" in the Science of Logic. Beyond Kant and Hegel, I also consider how two contemporary philosophers, Graham Priest and Alain Badiou, have jointly updated the consequences of Plato's original hypotheses. In support of the idea that antimonies are ineliminable apparent contradictions rather than true contradictions or resolvable disputes I compare the philosophical arguments of Priest, Badiou, Kant, and Hegel to the poetic conceits of, respectively, Dante Alighieri, Susan Howe, William Blake, and William Wordsworth.

As this summary suggests my approach to philosophy is holistic, historical, and comparative. You can get a sense of the kind of work I do by taking a look at my article “‘Was it for this?’ Brandom, Hegel, Wordsworth, Žižek, and the Terror”.

My professional service has included twelve years as editor of the Continental section of Philosophy Compass, two three-year terms on the Executive Committee of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and one year on the program committee of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association.

Please email me if you'd like to get in touch.

Education

PhD, Northwestern University

Publications/Research Listings

The One and the Others: Metaphysics, Poetry, and the Antimonies of Plato's Parmenides, Northwestern University Press, 2025.

The Problems of Contemporary Philosophy: A Critical Guide for the Unaffiliated (co-authored with Paul Livingston), Polity, 2015

Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide: Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century (co-edited with Jeffrey Bell and Paul Livingston), Routledge, 2015

All for Nothing: Hamlet's Negativity, MIT, 2014

Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction, Routledge, 2005

The Owl at Dawn: A Sequel to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, SUNY, 1995