DANIEL ADSETT

Born and raised in New Brunswick, Canada, I attended St. Thomas University in Fredericton after finishing high school. Four years later, I graduated with a double honours in history and philosophy. From there I went on to the Memorial University of Newfoundland where I wrote a thesis under the direction of Sean McGrath on Heidegger and medieval philosophy. While at Memorial, I took a seminar on Karl Jaspers' General Psychopathology. I found the text immensely fascinating and was captivated by the way Jaspers described and quoted accounts of abnormal psychological experiences. After presenting a paper at a Karl Jaspers Society of North America meeting at the World Congress of Philosophy in Athens, I became more involved with Jaspers research. This interest continued to grow when, as a doctoral student at Marquette University, I decided to write a dissertation, under the direction of Pol Vandevelde, that would develop a Jaspersian account of irrationality. While working on my dissertation, I spent time at the Jaspers Haus in Oldenburg, Germany where Jaspers' personal library now remains. The dissertation that resulted is titled "The Status of Irrationality: Karl Jaspers' Response to Davidson and Searle" and in it I bring Jaspers' ideas into dialogue with two competing Anglo-American views of rationality. In the dissertation, I argue that irrationality is not a matter of failing to abide by certain 'laws of reasoning,' or of failing to appreciate 'available evidence.' Irrationality, on the Jaspersian view I develop, names an inalterability whereby an individual or community refuses to accept the possibility that its worldview might need to be revised. It brings all experience and evidence into line with its pre-formed way of seeing things so as never to raise the possibility of self-doubt or self-questioning.