Passion, Death, and Spirituality

David Sherman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montana.  His research focuses on German Idealism, existential phenomenology, and the Frankfurt School.  He is the author of Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity (SUNY, 2007) and Camus (Blackwell, 2009), and he is a coeditor of the Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy (with Robert Solomon, Blackwell, 2003) and Reading Negri (with Pierre LaMarche and Max Rosenkrantz, Open Court, 2011).

Kathleen M. Higgins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.  Her main areas of research are continental philosophy and aesthetics, particularly musical aesthetics.  She has published a number of books: The Music between Us:  Is Music the Universal Language? (Chicago, 2012), Comic Relief: Nietzsche's “Gay Science” (Oxford University Press, 2000), What Nietzsche Really Said (with Robert C. Solomon, Schocken Books, 2000), A Passion for Wisdom (with Robert C. Solomon, Oxford, 1997), A Short History of Philosophy (with Robert C. Solomon, Oxford, 1996), The Music of Our Lives (Temple, 1991; Lexington, 2011), and Nietzsche's “Zarathustra” (Temple, 1987; rev. ed., Lexington, 2010), which Choice named an Outstanding Academic Book of 1988-1989.  She has edited or co-edited several other books on such topics as Nietzsche, German Idealism, aesthetics, ethics, erotic love, and non-Western philosophy.  She has been a Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center (1993), and a Visiting Fellow of the Australian National University Philosophy Department and Canberra School of Music (1997).  She has also received an Alumni Achievement Award from the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (1999).  She is a frequent visitor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.