Headshot of Dr.Gary  Shapiro

Dr. Gary Shapiro

Professor of Philosophy, Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus
  • Profile

    Gary Shapiro received B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, where he was also an Instructor in Philosophy. After twenty-one years teaching at Kansas University, he was appointed to his position at Richmond, becoming Emeritus in 2011. Shapiro’s research has focused on Continental Philosophy and the philosophy of art, as well as topics in British empiricism and American philosophy. He has published five books: Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics (2016); Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (2003); Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel (1995); Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women (1991); Nietzschean Narratives (1989). Since 2016 Shapiro has published a number of articles, on topics including Herman Melville, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and Arthur Danto’s aesthetics of place-related art. He has received fellowships from the School of Criticism and Theory, American Council of Learned Societies, National Humanities Center, and the Clark Art Institute. Shapiro has recently been writing and lecturing on philosophical aspects of current controversies concerning monuments and memorials, and on the political aesthetics of land art and landscape architecture in the Anthropocene. Several of his books have been the subjects of symposia at academic conferences. A number of Shapiro’s articles have appeared in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Croatian, and Hungarian. 

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    • Presentations

      "Hegel Meets the Corleones: Critical Racket Theory and the American Crime Family," American Philosophical Association, January 2024


      "'My genius is in my nostrils': Nietzsche Sniffs the Air," Nietzsche Society at Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, October 2023


      “Earth Art in the Anthropocene: Times/Counter-Times, Monuments, Counter-Monuments” American Philosophies Forum, 2023 


      “Breathing Nietzsche’s Atmospheres” History of Philosophy Society, 2023


      “Nietzsche, Art, Entropy” Scholar’s Session, Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, 2021


      “Report from Richmond’s Monument Wars: Public Art, National Trauma, Being with the Dead” American Society for Aesthetics, 2020


      “Report from Richmond’s Monument Wars: Public Art, National Trauma, Being with the Dead” American Society for Aesthetics, 2020


      “Between the Nameless and the Named: Toward a Philosophy of the Novel” Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, 2019


      “After the ‘Monuments’: Public Art and Post-War Memory” American Philosophies Forum, 2018


      “Babette Babich: A Nietzschean Scholar on the ‘Physiology of Aesthetics’” Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, 2018


      “Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics” book session at Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, 2017


      “Land Art: The First 10,000 Years,” International Association for Environmental Philosophy, Salt Lake City, October 2016


      “Nietzsche’s Earth: Times of the Multitude and the Anti-Christ,” Joint Meeting of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society (UK) and the Nietzsche Gesellschaft (Germany), keynote, Naumburg, Germany, September 2016


      “Atmospheres and Diagrams: Preface to Geoaesthetics,” keynote, East-West Philosophy Conference, University of Hawaii, May 2016


      “‘The hours of daylight gather atmosphere’ : Garden Variety Philosophy”, keynote, Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle, Reykjavik, Iceland, May 16, 2015


      “The End of the World and Other Times in Leonard Cohen’s The Future” World Congress of Philosophy, Athens, Greece, August 2013


      “Nietzsche on Time and Political Theology,” annual Philosophy in Assos Conference, Assos Turkey, July 2013


      Kairos and chronos: Nietzsche on the Compression and Dilation of Time,” DePaul University, May 2013


      "Rethinking the Picturesque" (keynote talk and Wolfe Mays Memorial Lecture) British Society for Phenomenology and Irish Phenomenological Circle, Cork, Ireland, March 30-April 1, 2012


      “Garden Variety Philosophy: Geophilosophy and Geoaesthetics,” Brown University, Feb. 25, 2009


      “Earth’s Other Times,” CENDEAC (Center for Research in Contemporary Art) Murcia, Spain, March 11, 2008


      “Art and Diagram: Geophilosophy and Geoaesthetics,” California College of the Arts, December 6, 2007


      “Space, Time, and Hermeneutics,” (on Dennis Schmidt’s book, Lyrical Subjects), at Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, November 8, 2007


      “The Paradoxes of Art,” American Philosophical Association (invited main program symposium), December 2005


      “Borders, Boundaries, and Difficult Crossings,” (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy [SPEP] invited session, response to Edward Casey) American Philosophical Association, December 27, 2005


      “On Archaeologies of Vision,” (SPEP invited session on my book), October 20, 2005


      “Assassins and Crusaders: Nietzsche After 9/11,” Nietzsche in New York Conference, Hunter College, April 8, 2005


      “Vision: Merleau-Ponty and Foucault,” American Philosophical Association, (invited main program symposium) Dec. 30, 2004

    • Institutional Service

      Philosophy Workshop: Nietzche's New Politics, 2007

      Film Series: Thinkers on Film, 2008

      Faculty Seminars directed at the University of Richmond:

      • Multiculturalism, 1994
      • Seeing Across Cultures, 1997 (co-directed with Stephen Addiss)
      • Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze

  • Publications
    Books

    Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics, University of Chicago Press, September 2016

    Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying, University of Chicago Press, 2003, 438 pp., 29 illustrations

    Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel, University of California Press, 1995; xiv + 271 pp.

    Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women, State University of New York Press, 1991; xii + 158 pp.

    After the Future: Postmodern Times and Places, State University of New York Press, 1990, 360 pp. (Collection of original essays)

    Nietzschean Narratives, Indiana University Press, 1989; x + 179 pp.

    Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, co-editor (with Alan Sica) University of Massachusetts Press, 1984, 310 pp.; paperback edition, Fall 1988 (Collection of original essays)

    Journal Articles

    "Earth Art in the Great Acceleration: Times/Counter-Times, Monuments/Counter-Monuments," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 38:1, 2024, pp, 47-61

    “Public Art: Monuments, Memorials, Earthworks” in A Companion to Arthur Danto, ed. Lydia Goehr and Jonathan Gilmore (Blackwell, 2022)

    “George Quasha’s Words of Wonder,” in Zero Point Poiesis: George Quasha;s Axial Art, ed. Burt Kiimmelman (Aporeia, 2022)

    “’Who Shall be Lord of the Earth?’: Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Thinking ‘Beyond the Line’” in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2021

    “Times of the Multitude and the Antichrist,” in European/Supra-European: Cultural Encounters in Nietzsche’s Philosophy, ed. Michael McNeal et. al. (de Gruyter, 2020)

    "Reading Dostoevsky in Turin: The Antichrist's Accelerationism," in Nietzsche and the Antichrist: Religion, Politics, and Culture in Late Modernity, Daniel Conway, ed. (Bloomsbury, 2019)

    “Nietzsche and Anaximander: The Innocence of Becoming, or Life Without a Mortgage," in Mark Conard, ed. Nietzsche and the Philosophers (Routledge, 2017)

    "Beasts, Sovereigns, Pirates: Melville's 'Enchanted Isles' Beyond the Picturesque," in Melville Among the Philosophers, Corey McCall and Tom Nurmi, eds. (Lexington, 2017) 

    "World, Earth, Globe: Geophilosophy in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Rosenzweig," iyyun, 2015

    “States and Nomads: Hegel’s World and Nietzsche’s Earth,” in Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life, ed. Vanessa Lemm (Fordham, 2014)

    “The End of the World and Other Times in ‘The Future,’” in Leonard Cohen and Philosophy, ed. Jason Holt (Open Court, 2014)

    Kairosand chronos in the Time of the Multitude: Nietzsche and the Time of the Political,” in Nietzsche’s Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Continuum, 2013)

    "Earth's Garden Happiness: Nietzsche's Geoaesthetics of the Anthropocene," Nietzsche-Studien, 2013

    “Speaking a Word for Nature: Thoreau’s Philosophical Saunter,” in Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust (Festschrift for Berel Lang), ed. Carol Gould et. al. (Lexington, 2013)

    “Then and Now, Here and There: On the Grounds of Aesthetics,” in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2012 

    “Reading on the Edge of Oblivion: Virgil and Virgule in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron” in Literary Studies and the Practice of Reading, Festschrift for Clayton Koelb, ed. Eric Downing et. al. (Camden, 2012)

    “Then and Now, Here and There: On the Grounds of Aesthetics,” in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2012 

    “The Absent Image: Translation as Impossible and Necessary,” Journal of Visual Culture (April 2007) pp. 13-24 (lead article)

    “Territories, Landscapes, Gardens: Toward Geoaesthetics,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 9:2 (2004), pp. 103-115

    “‘Give Me a Break!’ Emerson on Fruit and Flowers,” in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1999, pp. 98-113 

    "Pipe Dreams: Eternal Recurrence and Simulacrum in Foucault's Ekphrasis of Magritte." Word & Image 13, no. 1 (January 1997)

    “Diasporas,” in Jacob Golomb, ed. Nietzsche and Jewish Culture (Routledge, 1997) 

    “Jean-Luc Nancy and the Corpus of Philosophy,” in Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin, eds. Thinking Bodies (Stanford University Press, 1994) 

    “Go Figure! Refiguring Disfiguring,” (Review essay of Mark Taylor’s Disfiguring”), Philosophy Today, Fall 1994

    “Debts Due and Overdue: Beginnings of Philosophy in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Anaximander,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, Richard Schacht, ed. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994)

    “Art and its Doubles: Danto, Foucault and their Simulacra,” in Mark Rollins, ed., Danto and his Critics (Blackwell’s, 1993)

    L’abime de la vision,” Revue d'esthetique, 24/93

    “Deaths of Art: David Carrier’s Metahistory of Artwriting,” in Leonardo, vol. 25, no. 2, 1992 

    “Translating, Repeating, Naming:  Foucault, Derrida and the Genealogy of Morals,” in Nietzsche and Postmodernism, edited by Clayton Koelb (State University of New York Press, 1990) 

    “To Philosophize is to Learn to Die,” in Signs in Culture: Roland Barthes Today, edited by Steven Ungar and Betty McGraw, University of Iowa Press, 1989

    “Entropy and Dialectic: The Signatures of Robert Smithson,” Arts Magazine, Summer 1988

    “What was Literary History?” Social Epistemology, 1988, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 3-19 

    “An Ancient Quarrel in Hegel’s Phenomenology,” The Owl of Minerva, Spring 1986, pp. 165-180 

    “Gadamer, Habermas, and the Death of Art,” The British Journal of Aesthetics, Winter 1986, pp. 39-47 

    “From the Sublime to the Political,” in New Literary History, 1985 (XVI:2), pp. 213-235 

    “Nietzschean Aphorism as Art and Act.” in Man and World, (now Continental Philosophy Review) 17:  3-4 (1984), pp. 399-429 and in Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (Nijhoff, 1985), pp. 159-190

    “Peirce and Derrida on First and Last Things,” in University of Dayton Review, Spring 1984 (Hermeneutics issue), pp. 33-38

    “Nietzsche Contra Renan,” History and Theory, 1982, 2, pp. 193-222

    “Reading and Writing in the Text of Hobbes’s Leviathan,” The Journal of the History of Philosophy, April 1980, pp. 147-157

    “Hegel on the Meanings of Poetry,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, Spring 1975, pp. 88-107; published also in Art and Logic in Hegel's Philosophy, edited by W. Steinkraus and K. Schmitz, Humanities Press, 1980, pp. 35-54

    “The Owl of Minerva and the Colors of the Night,” Philosophy and Literature, Fall 1977, pp. 276-294

    “Notes on the Animal Kingdom of the Spirit,” Clio, Spring 1979, pp. 323-338.

    “Hegel’s Dialectic of Artistic Meaning,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Fall 1976, pp. 23-35

    “Intention and Interpretation in Art: A Semiotic Analysis,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Fall 1974, pp. 33-42
    Book Chapters

    "Reading Dostoevsky in Turin: The Antichrist's Accelerationism," in Nietzsche and the Antichrist: Religion, Politics, and Culture in Late Modernity, Daniel Conway, ed. (Bloomsbury, 2019)

    "Beasts, Sovereigns, Pirates: Melville's 'Enchanted Isles' Beyond the Picturesque," in Melville Among the Philosophers, Corey McCall and Tom Nurmi, eds. (Lexington, 2017)

    “Casey Comes to the Edge: Borders, Boundaries, Diagrams, Arts, Islands,” in A. Cruz-Pierre and D. Landes, eds. Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey (Bloomsbury, 2013)

    "Nietzsche and Anaximander: The Innocence of Becoming, or Life Without a Mortgage," in Mark Conard, ed. Nietzsche and the Philosophers (Routledge, 2017)

     “States and Nomads: Hegel’s World and Nietzsche’s Earth,” in Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life, ed. Vanessa Lemm (Fordham, 2014)

    “The End of the World and Other Times in ‘The Future,’” in Leonard Cohen and Philosophy, ed. Jason Holt (Open Court, 2014)

    Kairos and chronos in the Time of the Multitude: Nietzsche and the Time of the Political,” in Nietzsche’s Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Continuum, 2013)

    “Speaking a Word for Nature: Thoreau’s Philosophical Saunter,” in Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust (Festschrift for Berel Lang), ed. Carol Gould et. al. (Lexington, 2013)

    “Reading on the Edge of Oblivion: Virgil and Virgule in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron” in Literary Studies and the Practice of Reading, Festschrift for Clayton Koelb, ed. Eric Downing et. al. (Camden, 2012)

    “Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art 1840-1900,” in History of Continental Philosophy II, ed. Daniel Conway (Acumen, 2010)

    “The Philosophy of Central Park: The Pragmatic Picturesque,” in Gardening: Philosophy for Everyone, ed. Dan O’Brien (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

    “Assassins and Crusaders: Nietzsche After 9/11” Nietzsche at the Margins ed A. Hicks and A. Rosenberg (Purdue University Press, 2007), pp. 186-204

    “Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Religion,” in The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Chad Meister (Routledge, 2007), pp. 170-180

    “Nietzsche on Geophilosophy and Geoaesthetics,” in the Blackwell Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Blackwell, 2006), pp. 477-494

    “Ariadne’s Thread: Walter Benjamin’s Hashish Passages,” in High Culture: Reflections on Addiction and Modernity, ed. Anna Alexander and Mark Roberts (State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 59-74

    “Nietzsche and Visuality” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford, 1998), vol.3, pp. 364-366

    “French Aesthetics: Contemporary Painting Theory,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 235-240

    “Diasporas,” in Jacob Golomb, ed. Nietzsche and Jewish Culture (Routledge, 1997), pp. 244-262

    “Debts Due and Overdue: Beginnings of Philosophy in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Anaximander,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, Richard Schacht, ed. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 358-375

    “Art and its Doubles: Danto, Foucault and their Simulacra,” in Mark Rollins, ed., Danto and his Critics (Blackwell’s, 1993), pp. 129-141

    “Subversion of System/Systems of Subversion,” (on Hegel), in Writing the Politics of Difference, Hugh J. Silverman, editor (State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 1-12

    “Translating, Repeating, Naming:  Foucault, Derrida and the Genealogy of Morals,” in Nietzsche and Postmodernism, edited by Clayton Koelb (State University of New York Press, 1990) pp. 39-55

    “To Philosophize is to Learn to Die,” in Signs in Culture: Roland Barthes Today, edited by Steven Ungar and Betty McGraw, University of Iowa Press, 1989, pp. 3-31

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