Paul is the subject librarian for East Asian Languages and Cultures, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy, Religion, and Arabic Language and Culture.
He received his Ph.D. with distinction from DePaul University (Chicago), specializing in ancient Chinese and contemporary European philosophy. His dissertation, “The Sense In Which All Things Move: Concepts of Meaning and World in Heidegger and the Zhuangzi 莊子,” deals with the idea of the limits of possible sense, experience, and language. It addresses problems in philosophical thought surrounding what it means “to be” (metaphysics/ontology), phenomenology, decolonial and/or intercultural method in interpretation, authorial intention, deconstruction, and the logical structure of humor and play. Along the way, he also deals with the crucial—and after the publication of the damning Black Notebooks, even more urgent—question of whether Heidegger himself can possibly be right that his horrendous views on race and politics actually follow from his philosophical concepts, or if in trying to base his racism and fascism on otherwise valuable philosophical contributions he has not simply made a catastrophically incoherent mess. (On these points, he ultimately thinks that Heidegger is a terrible interpreter of Heidegger.)
Before coming to Haverford, Paul worked in scholarly communication and publishing at the University of Pittsburgh and library research services at his alma mater, Marshall University (Huntington, West Virginia). He has also taught philosophy, gender theory, literature, and religious studies at universities in the United States and China.
Paul is in the final stages of turning his dissertation into a book, and will soon begin graduate study in library science.
ORCiD: 0000-0002-9083-0053 — (What is this?)