About

My name is Matt Feeney. I live in Oakland with my wife Juliet and our three kids. I’m an essayist and the author of a recent book about family life (Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age). I’ve written for The New Yorker, Slate, and other publications. I’m also at work on a comic novel about life in California. I hold a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Duke University and a B.S. in English teaching from Central Michigan University. I’ve taught English at a small-town high school near Flint, Michigan, and I’ve taught political philosophy at Duke, Texas A&M, George Washington University, and Friedrich Alexander Universität in Erlangen, Germany.

My academic research focused on two notoriously difficult German philosophers, Immanuel Kant and Jürgen Habermas. My great desire in writing about these thinkers was to make their abstract, elusive philosophies comprehensible to non-specialists. I’m driven by a similar impulse as an essayist and author. My writing often uses difficult philosophical ideas to illuminate popular issues of culture and politics while making the ideas themselves clear and relevant, and sometimes even fun and funny, for everyday readers. My serious interest in fiction, as both a reader and a writer, puts narrative methods at the center of all my work. For me, storytelling is a main ingredient of explanation and persuasion.

To see examples of my work, and for information on my rates, please contact me at mattfeen@gmail.com.

For links to my other writing visit my personal website.