In academic pursuits, I write my name as SJ Cowan. But I usually go by Scott. My interests are in thinkers like Kant, the German Romantics, and Wittgenstein, as well as in Critical Theory, and Feminist and Black thought.

My dissertation is (tentatively) titled The Play of Appearances: Aesthetic Semblance and the Reflective Conception of Art. Here is a brief abstract:

Why is art often understood as having critical or transformative power? How does aesthetic transformation differ from moral or political change? This dissertation centers on aesthetic semblance, a concept that is widely invoked yet rarely examined or clearly understood. Through close analyses of Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Adorno—alongside engagement with contemporary art and thinkers like Dewey, Langer, Danto, Osborne, and Noë—I clarify the relationship between art and aesthetics, revealing how aesthetic experience shapes our conceptions of freedom, subjectivity, and human formation. In doing so, I demonstrate that aesthetic semblance is foundational to the philosophy of aesthetics and our inherited conception of art.

In addition to the Philosophy department, I am a part of the Program in Critical Theory here at Berkeley. Beginning in January 2022, I joined (as a visiting PhD fellow) a research group—“Reorganizing Ourselves” headed by Alva Noë—at the Freie Universität in Berlin. And in October 2024, with support from the ASA Dissertation Completion Award, I became a visiting doctoral fellow at the Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy, in Potsdam.

Prior to coming to Berkeley, I studied photography (BFA, Columbia College), theology (MA, Fuller Seminary), and philosophy (MA, UW-Milwaukee).