Jordan Daniels

Jordan Daniels is a philosopher working at the intersections of critical theory, comparative environmental philosophy, and feminist thought. Daniels is interested in questions of what appears to us as “natural” and what appears to be the product of human activity and influence. Denaturalizing what are in fact the effects of changeable human practices has long been a tool in many critical philosophies, used by thinkers to challenge the “naturalness” of a given economic and political system, of sexual and racial hierarchies, and of the relationships between these features organizing contemporary life.

Alongside this useful critical operation, Daniels is curious about other senses of the term “nature,” especially in contemporary environmental philosophy, and what is valuable in understanding ourselves to be “natural.” In keeping with thinkers from Frankfurt School critical theory, ecological feminism, and non-Western traditions, she investigates configurations of our ethical attachments while challenging a strict dualism between nature and human activity. This line of questioning leads her to reconceive standard accounts of aesthetic experience and the role of aesthetic experience in our ethical lives, particularly in relation to the more-than-human world.

Daniels has presented and published on the radical politics of place at work in Walter Benjamin’s radio broadcasts for youth, on ecofeminists' materialist analyses of witch-hunting and contemporary challenges for political solidarities across different cosmologies, and on the aesthetic experience of natural beauty in the work of Theodor Adorno, among other topics.