Kant

I first became interested in Kant when I was an undergraduate at Columbia University. I enjoyed thinking about the internal logic of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and spent many hours in Butler Library trying to make sense of the Transcendental Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason. I also came across the work of Philip Kitcher and Michael Friedman, who write about Kant's engagement with the sciences of his day.

In graduate school I was fortunate to attend two seminars on The Critique of Pure Reason. James Messina introduced me to many important secondary sources I had never read. Outside of these seminars, I read the second edition of Henry Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism, which presents the most persuasive reading of the first critique I have found to date.

In addition to my interest in more traditional Kant scholarship, I am also interested in Kant's influence on science and mathematics. J. Alberto Coffa's The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap is the most through text I have found on this topic. One summer in Madison, we had a productive weekly reading group in which we discussed the book.

Steve Nadler's terrific seminar on Leibniz gave me the opportunity to learn more about Kant's Early Modern influences. My term paper was about Leibniz's dispute with the Cartesians about the nature of force. In some places, Leibniz suggests that the Cartesian laws of motion are disconfirmed by observation. In others, he suggests that both his view and that of the Cartesians can save the phenomena, and argues for his own view on a priori grounds. The paper is an attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction.

In teaching ethics, I have been able to revisit Kant's Groundwork. I recently read some chapters from Allen Wood's Kantian Ethics, which has radically transformed my understanding of the Groundwork. Wood reading of Kant makes Kant's ethical theory seem much more defensible than it does on more commonly taught versions. I have used his book as a way to make Kant's theory much more compelling to my "Introduction to Ethics" students.

I hope to continue thinking about Kant and would enjoy teaching a course on the First Critique. I also hope to think further about the history of philosophy through the lens of more recent philosophy of science.