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
Questions they sharpened View the streams
Books
Videos & Interviews
Being in the World (Full Documentary)
Award-winning documentary featuring Dreyfus on Heidegger, embodiment, and skilled coping
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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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Hubert Dreyfus
CollaboratedPhilosopher & AI Critic
The two wrote All Things Shining (2011) together: an argument that the secular West has lost the skill of being drawn out by what shines, and that meaning is something cultivated in craft and shared moments rather than manufactured inside an isolated self. Kelly also appears in the Being in the World documentary, and his memorial tribute to Dreyfus — on this site — is titled simply 'The Teacher.'
en.wikipedia.org · All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (Free Press, 2011)
Dana Gioia
KindredPoet & Critic; Former Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts
All Things Shining and 'Can Poetry Matter?' are the same wager placed in different rooms: that a secular culture has not outgrown enchantment but lost the craft of meeting it, and that the old works — Homer and Melville for Kelly, the memorized poem for Gioia — are training manuals for that craft. Kelly recovers the skill by rereading the classics; Gioia built national programs to make the encounter public, one recitation at a time.
