Kaitlyn Creasy

Kaitlyn Creasy is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at California State University, San Bernardino. In addition to working in 19th-century European philosophy and moral psychology, she works on meaning in life and issues at the intersection of ethics, the philosophy of emotion, and social philosophy.

She is fundamentally interested in people: what being a human being and an individual person involves, and how we can “be” both of these things more and less well; the complexities of our inner lives (including their social and relational formation; and how people come together—and fall apart—in different forms of interpersonal relationship, especially ones that they experience as deeply significant. She is especially absorbed by (and frankly a bit obsessed with) attending to and sketching the landscape of human need and desire. This shows up in her work on loneliness, togetherness, and belonging, including on the significance of feeling seen and understood by another for beings like us: social, emotional, and valuing beings for whom these dimensions are intertwined.

Her interest in people drives her work in Nietzsche studies, which focuses on his philosophical psychology, especially the social formation of our emotional lives and various (negative and positive) effects of that formation, his accounts of personal transformation and self-affirmation, and the complicated relationship he proposes between flourishing, empowerment, and forms of psychic disunity (including incoherence and ambivalence).

She is the author of The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche (2020). She also has articles published in Philosophical Studies, the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, The European Journal of Philosophy, Inquiry, Philosophical Psychology, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Environmental Philosophy, and Philosophical Forum and has contributed to several anthologies, including the Cambridge Critical Guide to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

She loves the forest, the ocean (especially the Pacific!), and wilderness of all kinds (including the wilder parts of our nature), and she loves spending time encountering (and coming to know) the natural world in as many ways as she can, including by longboard. She also loves the intimacy of her closest friendships, street haunting in unfamiliar cities, food, making eclectic playlists, yoga, films (usually depressing ones) that explore life's ambiguities, vibrant colors, poetry, and turning academic biographies into lists of likes and loves. And she finds there's very much beauty to appreciate in the world, which is part of why she is generally happy to be alive (though, like many, she finds the whole thing quite difficult at times).