Drew Dalton

Drew M. Dalton is an American philosopher and a professor of English at Indiana University. Previously, he was a professor of philosophy at Dominican University. He is known for his works on continental philosophy. Dalton received his Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy from the Institute of Philosophy at the KU Leuven focusing on phenomenology and ethics, social and political philosophy.

Dalton's work primarily address the concept of the absolute as it affects the various sub-branches of philosophy: ethics, metaphysics and aesthetics.

In ethics, Dalton argues that the pursuit of an absolute good inevitably leads to evil. Nevertheless, Dalton argues, one should not give up on the idea of absolutes entirely nor on the possibility of the good. Instead, Dalton promotes "ethical resistance," as the proper way of relating to any given absolute and pursuing the good. Only when the good is conceived of negatively, as a mode of resisting the possibility of absolute evil, he argues, can both the idea of the absolute and the concept of goodness be integrated into a practical ethics. In this way, his work on ethics draws from the tradition of philosophical pessimism to suggest that the good can only ever be conceived relatively, in relation to what he calls the "absolute evil of existence."

In metaphysics, Dalton argues for the idea of a "naturalized" or "material" absolute which he argues is deducible from the conclusions of contemporary scientific research, specifically work in contemporary thermodynamic astrophysics and biophysics on the function and nature of entropic decay over and within existence. From this, Dalton proposes a new conception of being as something which is "unbecoming."

In aesthetics, Dalton extends the conclusions of philosophical pessimism to champion an "aesthetics of escape," which justifies the indulgence in any artistic object that might effectively distract us from what he calls the "horror of reality," a conclusion he draws from his metaphysics and ethics.