Our Faculty

Background

Nicolas Garcia Mills is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Binghamton University. Before coming to Binghamton, he was an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral research fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Before that, he taught in the Department of Philosophy at Tufts University. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2019. 

Garcia Mills’ research focuses primarily on the history of moral, social, and political philosophy in the post-Kantian tradition. His current work includes three research projects, devoted to (1) Hegel’s ethical views; (2) the social theories of Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School; and (3) 20th-century Latin American philosophy. Each of these projects is concerned in one way or another with the broader question: In what ways are we free (or unfree) and how do our animal nature and the natural and social worlds around us bear on our capacity for freedom and its exercise?

Selected Publications

• “Extravagance and Misery: Hegel on the Multiplication and Refinement of Needs," European Journal of Philosophy (2024)
• “Human Beings as the ‘Perfect Animals’: Hegel on the Difference between Animal Life and Human Spirit,” Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Guide, ed. Marina Bykova, Cambridge University Press (2024)
• “Hegel’s Ethical Organicism,” Inquiry (2022)
• “Hegelian Practical Freedom and Nature,” Journal of Modern Philosophy (2022)
• “Self-Consciousness is Desire Itself: On Hegel’s Dictum,” Review of Metaphysics (2021)
• “Hegel on the Normativity of Animal Life,” Hegel Bulletin (2020)
• “Realizing the Good: Hegel’s Critique of Kantian Morality,” European Journal of Philosophy (2017)

Education

• PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago
• MA, University of Illinois at Chicago
• MA, Universitat de Barcelona
• BA, Universitat de Barcelona

Research Interests

• 19th-century philosophy, especially Hegel and Marx
• Social and political philosophy
• Ethics
• Kant
• Latin American philosophy

More Info

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