Larry A. Herzberg, PhD
Larry A. Herzberg
About Me
Welcome to my (still fledgling) website! I tend to avoid social media for all of the well-discussed reasons, so this will be where to find me for professional updates going forward. The site is still in the process of being built, so please inform me (via the email address at the bottom of this page) of any formatting issues.Here are some basic facts about my academic career. I spent my childhood in Florida and my teen years in Hawaii, where I attended Punahou School (the photo above was taken at my 50th high school reunion). I received a BA in philosophy from Reed College in 1976 and then spent 14 years in Los Angeles as a touring and studio guitarist (while also dabbling in fiction writing and freelance computer programming). By the late 1980s I felt the need to return to philosophy, and after taking some refresher courses at California State University Northridge, I spent most of the 1990s at UCLA pursuing a PhD in philosophy, with Tyler Burge as my advisor. My research focused mainly on the philosophy of emotion and the epistemology of self-knowledge: how can we know what we are feeling and towards what (or whom) we are feeling it? While writing my dissertation I worked as an instructor at both UCLA (teaching the philosophy of emotion, logic, and existentialism) and California State University Long Beach (teaching ethics and critical reasoning). In 2003 I filed my dissertation and was fortunate enough to land a tenure-track position at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. After receiving tenure there in 2009, I continued teaching and doing research at UWO until January 2024, at which time I retired from teaching in order to spend more time on my research. For abstracts and downloads of most of my articles, click on the “Research” link above. For more details about my academic career, click on “CV” above.Over the last ten or so years, I’ve developed an interest in the philosophy of sex and love, publishing articles and giving presentations on the possibility that sexual attraction is an emotion (rather than just an instinct or appetite), as well as on the question of whether one can justifiably doubt that one is in love (even when one is so). This work culminated in a two-year project on the topic of sexual passion – specifically, on the states of sexual desire and sexual attraction that underlie our central notions of sexual orientation and sexual identity.
Forthcoming Book
The Moral Psychology of Sexual Passion, to be published February 2027 by Bloomsbury Academic, is the result of that project. This book brings together fourteen diverse philosophers (including myself as editor and contributor) with a variety of sometimes provocative views on the nature and value of sexual passion. For more on the book, including its Table of Contents (with all the contributors’ names), just click on the cover-
Topics covered include how classifications of sexual passion can reveal the classifier’s values; the conditions under which “giving in” to one’s sexual impulses should take precedence over pursuing one’s longer-term goals; the possibility of there being an “agapic” (value-bestowing) form of lust similar to agapic love; the need to distinguish passionate from dispassionate desires in any adequate analysis of sexual desire; how one’s awareness of sexual anatomy—along with certain contingencies of psychosocial development—may help to explain the personal significance of sexual attraction; how one’s sexual attractions can be rational or irrational in the same ways as one’s emotions; the relative importance of the physiological, phenomenal, psychological, and social dimensions of sexual orientation and identity; how asexuality or being “ace” might be a sexual orientation like being gay; how to best understand the appeal that kink and BDSM can have for some autistic people; the unique difficulties encountered by trans women interested in having sexual or romantic relationships with nontrans men; the complex sexual dynamics found within sexual liberation movements; and finally, how we might have a political right to sexual pleasure even if no individual has a duty to provide us with it.
If you have any questions about The Moral Psychology of Sexual Passion or any of my other research, please contact me at [email protected].