He is a radio host for WDBX Carbondale since 2001, a widely read author of popular philosophy, and also a co-founder and co-director of the American Institute for Philosophical and Cultural Thought.
He teaches and writes on Giambattista Vico, Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, J.J. Bachofen, Charles Peirce, Henri Bergson, Josiah Royce, William James, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, Ernst Cassirer, Susanne Langer, Charles Hartshorne, Jaakko Hintikka, Arthur Danto, and Umberto Eco.
He returned to Memphis State in the fall of 1984 and received an undergraduate degree in philosophy and criminal justice (magna cum laude) in 1986.
His dissertation examined the theories of signs and symbols that applied to the language of metaphysics, discussing principally the works of Cassirer, Langer, Peirce, and Eco.
In the fall of 1992 he became assistant professor and chair (1992–97) of the philosophy department at Oklahoma City University, and was the founding director of the OCU Institute of Liberal Arts (1994–99).
In 2001, Auxier was appointed editor of the Library of Living Philosophers, the third in its history, following series founder Paul Arthur Schilpp (1938–1981), and Lewis Edwin Hahn (1981–2001).
This series is important to scholars because it provides an opportunity to critics and supporters of a valuable philosophical figure to address the thinker, while still alive, regarding any problems or ambiguities that may have arisen around his or her thought over the course of his or her career.
The central thinker then responds to these questions or concerns, and, thus, the volume provides the opportunity for a final and definitive discussion regarding the thought of a world-renowned contemporary philosopher.
During his editorship, Auxier worked with and completed volumes on Seyyed Hossein Nasr (2001), Marjorie Grene (2003), Jaakko Hintikka (2006), Michael Dummett (2007), Richard Rorty (2010), and Arthur C. Danto (2013).
In November 2016, in response to the decision of Southern Illinois University Carbondale to dismiss all staff and cease all projects of the Center for Dewey Studies, Auxier, along with John R. Shook and Larry A. Hickman (Director Emeritus of the Center for Dewey Studies) founded the American Institute of Philosophical and Cultural Thought.
AIPCT dedicated to the continuation of the work of the Dewey Center, to the greatest extent possible, as well as to a broad range of other cultural and scholarly activities.
AIPCT is affiliated with several scholarly organizations, including the Institute of American Religious and Philosophical Thought and the Foundation for the Philosophy of Creativity and works closely with the Special Collections Research Center of the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Auxier has authored or co-authored many lectures and presentations around the United States and in other countries, has written many scholarly articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and translations.
Subjects on which he has published range from John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead to the limits of evolution, biker bars, and rock music.
His recent work includes Time, Will and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce, (Open Court 2013); Metaphysical Graffiti: Deep Cuts in the Philosophy of Rock (Open Court 2017), and, with Gary L. Herstein, The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead's Radical Empiricism (Routledge, 2017).
Auxier writes a regular blog for Radically Empirical, an online magazine that features essays and commentary on current and literary affairs.
Such processes are brought to language by poetic insight which provide the “basis phenomena” (Cassirer's term) of human experience.
Auxier holds that symbolic reasoning is expressive, emotive, diachronic, and largely unreflective (capable even of falling below the threshold of conscious thought).
[8] Radical empiricists hold that experience as human beings have it includes all the relations needed to bring it into adequate, applicable, and logically rigorous form.
Infinitely many extensional schemes are possible of the basis of intensive symbol functions, but all are well encompassed by the four-term semiotic schema Auxier provides.
Schelling, J.J. Bachofen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Cassirer and a number of post-humanist critics, such as Michel Foucault,[13] and Jacques Derrida.
He argues that the organization of the cosmos in the broadest sense already includes not only the potentiality for life, but also for precisely the organizations of energies that characterize human life as dedicated to the creation of symbols and signs, as well as the modes of response we call “consciousness.” Thus, culture is an activity of animals (including but not limited to humans) in concert with and embedded form of potencies already characteristic of the physical universe and the modes of order it currently exhibits.
The individual is not the inevitable and crowning jewel of cultural development, contrary to the views of Cassirer, Dewey and other classical liberals.
He uses the vehicle of popular culture to explain and illustrate his more formal philosophical views, especially regarding aesthetics, ethics, and politics.
Auxier holds, contrary to classical liberalism, that politics is a subdivision of ethics and cannot be divorced from human moral life.
Auxier applies his metaphysics, logic, ethics and aesthetics to the critique of science by opposing reductionist and model-centric versions of scientific knowledge.
The quantum is, in Auxier's view, an overdetermined image modeled precisely and carefully to serve as the exact unit which is irreducibly present in the whole which is to be explained.
Thus, all scientific knowledge proceeds by a kind of mereotopology, by the creation of s suitable space of explanation and a re-enactment of its primary characters according to the complex features immanent in the quantum.
[26] The ability to identify and describe a quantum for these purposes is a kind of talent that some people possess as a refinement of their aesthetic reflective intuition.
His commitment to nonviolence, environmental conservation, and community localism has led him to participate, organize, speak, and perform music at hundreds of events and for many causes.