Zachary Willcutt, adjunct professor of philosophy, received his doctorate from Boston College. His teaching and research are motivated by the question of the possibility of ethics—how is something like ethics possible? That is, how might a relation to and encounter with the good occur? In a current draft monograph, Prolegomena to an Ethics: Retrieving the Ontological Sources of Normativity in Max Scheler and Emmanual Levinas, Willcutt suggests that the good is located in the relation to the concrete other person, both human and divine, that occurs through the passion of love. The self is constituted by this passion of love that directs the
self beyond itself toward the Other. The relation to the Other, then, gives the self being and directs the self to the good, joining together the transcendentals of the good and being on a new phenomenological basis.

Willcutt has further explored this concern for the ethical relation to the Other in articles including “Marcel and Augustine on Immortality: The Nothingness of the Self and the Exteriorization of Love as the Way to Eternity,” Marcel Studies (2020) and “Morality and the Atomic Age: Interpreting the Ethical Meaning of the Nuclear,” Humanities and Technology Review (2017).

Education:
-Ph.D., Philosophy
-Boston College
-M.A., Philosophy
-Boston College
-B.A., Philosophy
-University of Dallas

Areas of Specialization:
Medieval Philosophy, Phenomenology, Ethics

Areas of Competence:
History of Philosophy, German Idealism, Philosophy of Religion

Course Level: Undergraduate

Course(s) Taught: PHIL 320 Modern Philosophy