Sean Dorrance Kelly
Dean of Arts and Humanities & Professor of Philosophy, Harvard
About
Sean Dorrance Kelly is Dean of Arts and Humanities and the Teresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Before joining Harvard in 2006, he taught at Stanford and Princeton and was a visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is considered a leading interpreter of the French and German phenomenological tradition and a prominent philosopher of mind, with research spanning existentialism, perception, and the philosophy of literature. His New York Times bestseller 'All Things Shining,' co-authored with Hubert Dreyfus, argues that Western culture has lost its skill for encountering the sacred and looks to Homer, Dante, and Melville to recover a secular form of meaning.
Key Contributions
- Co-authored 'All Things Shining' with Hubert Dreyfus, arguing that modern life has lost practices for encountering meaning and the sacred
- Interprets French and German phenomenology for questions about perception, skill, literature, and attention
- Connects philosophy of mind with lived practices rather than treating cognition as detached information processing
- Led Harvard's Philosophy Department and later Arts and Humanities division, shaping institutional space for humanistic inquiry
- His public philosophy is unusually readable, though its recovery of meaning through classics can strike critics as selective or nostalgic
Videos & Interviews
Celebrating Hubert Dreyfus: Sean Kelly -- "The Teacher" (part 1)
Sean Kelly's tribute to Dreyfus as a teacher and mentor at the memorial celebration
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Sean Kelly: Existentialism, Nihilism, and the Search for Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #227
Harvard philosopher Sean Kelly on existentialism, nihilism, phenomenology, and the search for meaning in a secular age — drawing on his work with Hubert Dreyfus in 'All Things Shining.'
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