Amy Levine

Amy Levine is a philosopher with three main areas of research interest. First, in metaethics and moral psychology, she focuses on questions about the nature of agency, practical reason, and normativity. Second, she works on the history of 19th and 20th century European philosophy, especially Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger. Third, she has a serious interest in psychoanalysis, which informs her approach to questions in ethics and the philosophy of agency. 

She is working on two book projects. In a monograph based on her dissertation, tentatively titled Anxious Subjects: On not knowing how to live, she looks to a 19th and 20th century post-Kantian, existentialist tradition to recover a concept of anxiety as a structural characterization of our agency, not just an affective condition. Anxiety is an agent’s self-awareness of a dimension of human finitude that is overlooked by other philosophical accounts: that we each live only one life, which means that in any situation, we cannot do everything that there is reason to do. Anxious Subjects argues that human agency is essentially anxious, in the same way that it is essentially rational and self-conscious, and shows how this characterization transforms our understanding of other dimensions of human finitude, including desire, immaturity, error, and unconsciousness in mental life. In addition, she is writing a volume of the Cambridge Elements series on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Heidegger on Anxiety, which offers a new interpretation of Heidegger’s discussion of anxiety in Being and Time. 

Levine holds a PhD in Philosophy and the Committee on Social Thought from the University of Chicago, a BPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Philosophy and English from Williams College. Her paper, “Heidegger on Anxiety and Normative Practice” appeared in Ergo in 2025.