Samuel Summers

Samuel Summers is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. His current research mostly turns around the broad ideas of “world” and “expression,” especially at the points where these two intersect. Some questions that animate his work are: What is a world, and how does one come to be? How do Being and beings hold together and shape one another? What, precisely, are “meaning,” “sense,” and “significance,” and how do these come to the fore in language? How are things found to be meaningful, and how does meaning circulate? What is the significance of the arts for our encounters with the world, and how might philosophy learn from the arts? How do the arts entwine with language? How do our linguistic milieus shape, or even define or delimit, our interaction with our worlds? How might the principles of language and ontology inform one another? How do our ontologies inform or flow through our politics, and how might the two be better conceived for a more thoroughly co-existential world? Thinkers he is interested in include—though are not limited to—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Theodor W. Adorno, Louis Althusser, and Frantz Fanon.

Research interests: Sense and Meaning; Relationality; Subjectivity and Subject Formation; Philosophy of Life; Philosophy of Imagination; History of Metaphysics; Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Deconstruction; Phenomenology; Critical Theory; Process Philosophy; Modern Philosophy

Recent Presentations: “Making « Sens » of « Sens » : The Sense – Meaning Distinction in Late Merleau-Ponty.” 63rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (October 2025).