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= J. Edward Hackett = J. Edward Hackett (1979-) is an American philosopher, professor, and published fantasy author.

Personal Life
J. Edward Hackett was born on June 27, 1979 in Lakewood, New Jersey. His mother is Sharon Hackett (1950-) and James Edward Hackett, Sr (1949-). Given that "Edward" was his mother's father's name, she decided to call him Edward. Though he has never gone by James, and has since used the J. Edward Hackett as a way to honor this choice by his mother in his publishing. He married his wife, Ashley Nicole Terrago (1982-). Originally from Boardman Ohio, a bordering town to Western Pennsylvania, Ed met Ashley when he was hired as Christmas help in a B-Dalton Bookstore in the Southern Park Mall in Boardman, Ohio. Ashley and Ed were married on July 30, 2006 at Stambaugh Auditorium in Youngstown, Ohio.

Education and Career
J. Edward Hackett attended several schools while growing up in New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. He attended middle school and high school at Neshannock High School in New Castle, Pennsylvania from 1994-1998. He attended Slippery Rock University from 1999-2003 and would later graduate with a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Then, he attended Simon Fraser University from 2006-2008, a largely analytic philosophy department where he started also teaching in 2006. After receiving his MA in philosophy from Simon Fraser University, Hackett attended Southern Illinois University for his doctorate from 2009-2013. Known for its strengths in American philosophy and Continental philosophy, Southern Illinois University provided Hackett with the freedom to explore the pluralistic facets that were brought together by his analytic, Continental, and American philosophical training. True to form, Hackett is a pluralist in philosophy, bringing together themes that have inspired his reflections in ethics, metaethics, philosophy of religion, phenomenology, and American pragmatism from across the analytic and Continental divide. This pluralism is reflected in his dissertation, Scheler's Phenomenological Ontology of Values: Implications and Reflections for Ethical Theory. In that work, Scheler's phenomenology is put into contact with William James, moral realists (G. E. Moore and W. D. Ross), and moral antirealists (Stevenson's emotivism).

At Southern Illinois University, Hackett was one of the graduate students present for Anthony Steinbock's founding of the Phenomenological Research Center. Steinbock hosted a phenomenological working group that SIU students could attend for credit, and these discussions were crucial in publishing his work on the Moral Emotions. These discussions also were formative on how one should engage in rigorous description of phenomena. Steinbock always proposed that a phenomena's givenness be described in several categories: personal, intrapersonal/otherness, temporality, and affectivity.

Originally, Hackett struggled with his own philosophical interests at both Simon Fraser University and Southern Illinois University. Should he be a Kantian metaethicist or a Husserlian phenomenologist? In fact, this outsider problem has always plagued his work. Always too analytic for straight up Continentals and always too Continental for dismissive analytic philosophers, not American enough and too Continental for some pragmatists, Hackett's work has more in common with a new generation of philosophers that consider both the Divide and these pretensions to get in the way of good philosophizing.

After receiving his doctorate, Hackett worked at several universities in Northeast Ohio before becoming a full-time Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame College in 2016-2017. In Fall 2017, Hackett was offered a full-time Lecturer position at Savannah State University in the Department of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Wellness both for his work in philosophy, but extensively because of his experience with minority and first-generation students in Cleveland and Akron.

Moreover, Hackett has been recognized as a gifted teacher in the University System of Georgia. He works also for the state system's online teaching across all institutions in the University System of Georgia's Ecore Program, hosted at the University of West Georgia. He was interviewed by their staff for his outstanding pedagogy and generous teaching style.

Philosophical Positions and Publications
Given the wide range of competency and style of Hackett's thinking since acquiring his doctorate, one should start in the beginning with what may be called his intense period and study of Max Scheler. Originally, Hackett came to work on the possibility of moral phenomenology and with Steinbock's work on Husserl and yet soon found that Kenneth Stikkers had been Manfred Frings's research assistant while at Depaul University. Stikkers introduced Hackett to the similarities and affinities between Scheler and James. From that union, however, Hackett began investigating how the two affinities could be synthesized to provide a metaphysical account of values. Hackett completed a book on both William James and Max Scheler and developed a position in metaethics known as participatory realism.

Participatory Realism
Originally, Max Scheler's use of the term "value" was never adequately delineated. Like many phenomenologists, the phenomenological descriptions seemed to promote an implicit ontology of value, yet that unstated ontology always remained implicit. This problem, Hackett called Scheler's ontological indeterminacy of value. Moreover, Hackett's criticism of Scheler also resonates with later developments in his phenomenological thinking. Phenomenologists always take for granted what they describe and their descriptions are forms of ontology then. Following Heidegger, Hackett showed how Scheler's Aktsein or what he translated as "being-in-an-act" and read through Heidegger's notion of Befindlichkeit provided a new way of thinking about the ontological status of values in Scheler's affective intentionality. Being-in-an-act is generative of values and reconstitutes their hierarchy intersubjectively between persons. The ontology of values in Scheler then must reflect how their genesis is located in the relationality of affective intentionality. Affective intentionality becomes the process by which values are realized and constituted. Persons participate in their very realization in feeling acts.

This ontological explanation mediates between those analytic metaethicists who elevate one-side of the affective intentional relation, say feelings act, over the other side, the value-quality correlation. On the subject side, you had the moral antirealists who elevated the importance of the subject and argued that values were generated solely from the emotions without any mind-independent reality to fix those standards of morality. For the moral antirealist, morality is mind-dependent. Next, the moral realists argued for a mind-independence realism that wrongly extracts the mind-independence on the part of the experienced value. Seeing values as either extricated from the phenomenological relation or feeling acts from the intended value-qualities reifies one side over another and then takes for granting the constituting feature of the intentional relation of phenomenological analysis. Participatory realism is, then, a thesis about the mind-independent nature of the sustaining an awareness of how values are realized within the affective relation that Scheler outlined as being-in-an-act. Moreover, participatory realism is committed to the irreducibility of this process as real feature of persons. In this way, participatory realism could also be labeled a process realism, or a process-relational metaethics. The case for participatory realism was made in Hackett's book, Persons and Values in Pragmatic Phenomenology: An Exploration in Moral Metaphysics (2018).

Personalist Ethics and Metaphysics
Given that Scheler is by his own description a personalist, and Hackett has attended the Personalist Research Group's biannual conference, Hackett has been highly influenced by thinking and comparing Scheler's phenomenologically-based personalism to some thinkers in the Boston Personalist school, primarily Edgar S. Brightman. Randall Auxier of Southern Illinois University first introduced Hackett to Brightman as a possible touchstone with his more Catholic-based personalism. In the last few years, Hackett has extensively made use of Brightman's process-based ethics as a possible model to correct Scheler's less than adequate normative ethics. In this way, Hackett has begun to publish comparative pieces on Brightman and Scheler.

Part of the exploration of personalism is friendly to the first-personal emphasis in both phenomenology and pragmatism. Moreover, Hackett agrees with James's critique of metaphysics. The relations we have are interpretations of the first-personal experiences inside time and the ongoing dynamism of those experiences. There is no access to reality as the rationalist maintains through a priori intuition. Instead, the Jamesian treats all metaphysical statements as one might treat a scientific hypothesis. As far as the metaphysical speculation enables us to make sense of our experience and there is no real evidence to contradict such speculation, then metaphysics is, at best, much like the will-to-believe in this metaphysical speculation or another. With the inability to access reality in its structure and know for sure, we are also left with a variety of ways of being. There is no knockdown argument between the Aristotelian nor the Roman Stoic, nor the Christian and Buddhist. Insofar as a hypothesis helps us live and does not harm our ability to work out and solve problems, then we must tolerate the useful consequences of another's belief system.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hackett has arranged travel to the King Papers at the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia. On several occasions, Hackett has lectured on King's philosophy as an extension of the Boston Personalist tradition. At Western Carolina University, Hackett was invited to deliver the Jerry Jackson Lectures on King titled, "Philosophical Reflections on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Idea of Love in Several Sermons." Originally, King received his doctorate from Boston University, and went to study under Edgar S. Brightman. King even announces this intention in his "My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" and recent philosophical attention by analytic philosophers have not read King in the horizon of his own self-description as a personalistic idealist in that piece.

Radical Empiricism and William James
Hackett has begun to see that Husserlian and Schelerian based phenomenologies are ontologically robust in their positing of essences. For Scheler, essences functionalize the moment they are performed in action. The person is an inexhaustible source of meaning and value. However, a radical empiricist is one who sees the ongoing irreducible content of experience as the basis on which one must interpret the world, find meaning, and is also available intersubjectively to other experiencers. However, following James, Hackett endorses a pluralism since radical empiricism also embraces the inaccessibility we have to reality. We have multiple interpretations of what can be experienced, but within what can be experienced a wide variety of relations exist from which we draw our interpretations. In this way, Hackett has moved away from phenomenology to a more infused pragmatic phenomenology. In this infused pragmatic phenomenology, radical empiricism has become the best form of phenomenology.

Hackett has also analyzed recent analytic attempts to interpret James. These readings depend upon seeing James as a subjectivist and ignoring the central place that radical empiricism occupies in understanding James in terms of his own ideas and texts. The affect of this scholarship has yielded invitations from the Russian Academy of Sciences to be interviewed for the 150 Years of Pragmatism from the Moscow based Institute of Philosophy.

Public Philosophy
Hackett has been involved in several popular culture and philosophy volumes. In an essay published on the AndPhilosophy blog, Hackett explained the justification for philosophers to be engaged in cultural critique: "Television writers borrow from the assumptions and implicit ideas that underlie our cultural narratives. Often, these assumptions or ideas are morally or philosophically suspect, but we would never know if we did not reflect on them. Cultural works are fuel for philosophical thought."

As part of the Savannah community, Hackett also wrote pieces about fake news, public virtue, and critical thinking as suggesting norms for public debate for the Savannah Morning News/SavannahNow.com. Due to editorial change in January 2018, the newspaper no longer wished to receive the insightful contributions based on philosophy and intelligence.

Published Books
Flight of the Ravenhawk (Ink Smith Publishing, 2019)

Persons and Values in Pragmatic Phenomenology: An Exploration of Moral Metaphysics (Vernon 2018)

Phenomenology for the 21st Century ( co-ed. with J. Aaron Simmons, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

House of Cards and Philosophy (Wiley Blackwell 2015)