Kelly is chair of Harvard University’s philosophy department. His work focuses on various aspects of the philosophical, phenomenological, and cognitive neuroscientific nature of human experience. His recent work has addressed a wide breadth of topics such as the experience of time, the possibility of demonstrating that monkeys have blindsighted experience, and the understanding of the sacred in Homer.
 

"The world doesn’t matter to us the way it used to. The intense meaningful lives of Homer’s Greeks, and the grand hierarchy of meaning that structured Dante’s medieval Christian world, both stand in stark contrast to our secular age. The world used to be, in its various forms, a world of sacred, shining things. The shining things now seem far away. This book is intended to bring them close once more."

– Sean Dorrance Kelley and Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age