DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

My research focuses on Kant and his philosophical context, broadly understood: both his eighteenth-century contemporaries, and post-Kantian, nineteenth-century philosophy. I am interested in practically every aspect of Kant’s philosophy, but my research has concentrated most on the Critique of Judgment, including work on Kant’s aesthetics, philosophy of biology, and questions concerning the possibility of empirical knowledge. Recently, I have been working on a collection of essays concerning the aspirational character of reason on Kant’s view: on the ideas of reason as presenting goals for scientific explanation, orienting the agent to moral life as a never-to-be-completed task, as restlessly driving historical change, or felt as precarious self-transcendence in the aesthetic experience of the sublime.   My work on eighteenth-century philosophy (beyond Kant) includes a book on Johann Gottfried Herder’s aesthetic theory and a collection of essays, in progress, treating various topics in eighteenth-century Scottish aesthetics. 

I have offered upper-level undergraduate courses on Kant, nineteenth-century philosophy, philosophy of the Enlightenment, philosophy of history, aesthetics (many different topics), and feminist philosophy, and graduate seminars on Kant, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics, eighteenth-century philosophy of history, and Kierkegaard. Future courses might focus on other figures in eighteenth-century philosophy (Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith), as well as new topics in aesthetics such as imitation or the aesthetics of critical theory.

Selected work

• Kant on Beauty and Biology:  An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• “Kantian Ideas of Reason and Empirical Scientific Investigation” in Michela Massimi and Angela Breitenbach, eds., Kant and the Laws of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 89-107.
• “Hidden Antinomies of Practical Reason, and Kant’s Religion of Hope,” Kant Yearbook 10 2018, 199-217.
• “Presenting the Unpresentable: Lyotard’s Kantian Art-Sublime,” Kantian Review 2021, 1-17.
• "Kant's Philosophy of History,as Response to Existential Despair," in Luigi Filieri and Sofie Møller, eds., Kant on Freedom and Human Nature (London: Routledge, 2023), 173-189.
• Herder’s Naturalist Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press, 2019.
• “Critique with a small ‘c’: Herder’s critical philosophical practice and anti-Critical polemics,” in María Acosta and Colin McQuillan, eds., Critique in German Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), pp. 155-172.
• “Reid’s Expressivist Aesthetics,” in Rebecca Copenhaver and Todd Buras, eds., Mind, Knowledge, and Action:  Essays in Honor of Thomas Reid’s Tercentenary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 139-60.
• “Adam Smith on Aesthetic Imagination and Scientific Inquiry,” British Journal of Aesthetics 2023, 1-17. doi: 10.1093/aesthj/ayad023
• “Shaftesbury and Hutcheson: Enthusiasm and Humor,” in Paul Katsafanis, ed., Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2023), 112-125.

Interview, Naturalist Herder and Arty Kant, with 3am Magazine.