Biography

Dr. Bechtol earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Texas A&M University - College Station. He teaches courses across the Philosophy curriculum at TAMUS. He grounds his courses in the history of philosophy and focuses on reading important texts within philosophy depending on the topic of the course. His interest within the history of philosophy focuses specifically on 19th-20th German and French philosophy in the fields of Phenomenology, Existentialism, and the approach to Philosophy of Religion from out of this period.

His research focuses specifically on the nature, as well as the ethical and theological implications, of events as these have been examined within current debate in continental European philosophy. His first book-length project, entitled A Death of the World: Surviving the Death of the Other, is under contract at SUNY Press. He is currently working on revisions of the manuscript. In this book, he expands the philosophical conversation around the idea of an event by providing a phenomenological description of the experience of surviving the death of someone. Drawing on the works of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, Dr, Bechtol argues that death is more than just the loss of a person because the death of the other entails the loss of the meaningfulness of the world constituted with and by the other who has died. He argues for this by looking at how the death of the other transforms the spatiality and temporality of the world for those who survive such death. 

Additionally, Dr. Bechtol’s next major research project is in the field of continental philosophy of religion where he explores the nature of religious faith in the aftermath of the death of God as found in the philosophies of Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Levinas, Simone Weil, Slavoj Zizek, and Julia Kristeva. This project examines the various spiritualities (i.e. ways of life) that are developed amidst the event-like character of existence. He has tentatively titled this project Continental Philosophy of Religion: Spiritualities Formed from the Desert.