Graduate Student, Philosophy
Doctoral student
Thesis Title: Keeping Our Selves Together: Kant's Metaphysics of the Self
Béatrice Longuenesse
Don Garrett
David Velleman
About
My current work focuses on understanding Kant's view of the self in the first Critique. The dominant view among readers of Kant is that the self should not be understood as any sort of entity. I think this is wrong - nothing Kant says requires us to abandon the commonsense view that the self is some sort of entity. The main motivation for the dominant view has been Kant's arguments against rational psychology in the Paralogisms chapter, but, on a close reading, those arguments in no way require a non-entity view of the self. Moreover, once we see what sort of metaphysics of the self is consistent both with the Paralogisms and with the Transcendental Deduction, a promising new interpretation of Kant's most fundamental approach to normativity emerges.
The grandest hope behind this project is that elucidating the metaphysics of the self will help in relating Kant's views both to those of his predecessors, and to contemporary views of the self. I've met a large number of excellent philosophers who claim that they can't make heads or tails of Kant or of most Kant scholarship, and I suspect this is because work needs to be done on clarifying the basic framework of Kant's philosophy (especially in the first Critique).
I am also working on a (secretly anti-Kantian) project concerning the role of empathy in metaethics. In addition, I have an ongoing interest in Spinoza, which has ended up significantly informing my work on Kant.
I'll be spending the 2008-2009 year getting reading for the job market, and will be spending most of the spring and summer in Berlin on a DAAD scholarship.
Within the next year, I'll be posting job materials here and at my NYU site: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~crm281/
Contact Information
NYU Dept. of Philosophy
5 Washington Pl.
New York, NY
10003