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2004-2005 Fellows

2004-2005 Fellow Pasanek

Brad Pasanek

Stanford University
Department of English

Brad Pasanek is a fifth-year graduate student in the English department at Stanford University. He is interested in the uses of figurative language in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy of mind. Brad spends much of his time searching electronic collections of literature for figures of speech. His dissertation is about "metaphors of mind" in literature and philosophy and describes the eighteenth-century careers of certain tropes and pictures.

Before studying at Stanford, Brad taught high school in Hoboken, New York City, and Pittsburgh. Some time before that he was a college student at the University of Chicago.

Project Summary

Brad is writing a history of the way people talked about the mind in the eighteenth-century England, trying to expand the usual philosophical histories (which cover Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and maybe Reid) to include second- and third-string philosophers, poets, essayists, novelists, etc. He is not strictly interested in who got what right when or which attempts were most philosophically rigorous, but rather what was said, what seemed believable, how theories get put together, taken apart, overturned, and renovated; what ordinary people seemed to think about the mind; what was written about the mind in competing literary genres; how philosophical systems get reduced to metaphors and catchphrases, misunderstood, and proliferated.