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Novalis's philosophical fictions: Love, reason, and the given from the Fichte‐Studies to the Hymns to the NightEuropean Journal of Philosophy 28 (3): 703-722. 2020.
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Novalis. Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine BrouillonState University of New York Press. 2007.
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On Bullshitting and BrainstormingTeaching Philosophy 11 (4): 301-313. 1988.
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Freedom and Autonomy in SchillerJournal of the History of Ideas 64 (1): 119-134. 2003.This essay provides a systematic as well as chronological account of Schiller's concepts of freedom and autonomy. Its main thesis is that the duality of Schiller's moral/aesthetic ideal in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man - of beauty and the sublime, of play and the moral law - is a result of his use of conflicting concepts of autonomy. While it is widely accepted that Schiller took over Kant's concept of autonomy, I argue that he simultaneously employed another concept of autonomy,…Read more
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Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life GoodOxford University Press. 2024.Negative emotions like anger, spite, contempt, and envy are widely seen as obstacles to a good life. They are like the weeds in a garden that need to be pulled up before they choke out the nice plants. This book argues that bad feelings aren't the weeds; they are the worms. Many people are squeamish about them and would prefer to pretend they aren't there, but the presence of worms mean the garden it thriving. I draw on insights from the history of philosophy to show what we've gotten wrong abou…Read more
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Ware, Owen. Fichte’s Moral PhilosophyEthics 133 (4): 658-662. 2023.
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Descartes's Method: The Formation of the Subject of ScienceOxford University Press. 2023.Descartes’s Method: The Formation of the Subject of Science provides a systematic interpretation of Descartes’s method in Rules for the Direction of the Mind and related texts. The book reconstructs Descartes’s method in its entirety and concretely demonstrates both the efficacy of the method in the sciences as well as the unity of the method from Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1620s) to Principles of Philosophy (1644). The principal thesis of the book is that Descartes’s method is a probl…Read more
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The Problem of Relevant Descriptions and the Scope of Moral PrinciplesEuropean Journal of Philosophy 25 (4): 1588-1613. 2017.In her seminal attack on modern moral philosophy, G. E. M. Anscombe claims that Kant's ‘rule about universalizable maxims is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it’. Although this so-called problem of relevant descriptions has received considerable attention in the literature, there is little agreement on how it should be understood or solved. My aim in this paper is, first, to clarify the problem by…Read more
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Practical Cognition and Knowledge of Things-in-ThemselvesIn Dai Heide & Evan Tiffany (eds.), The Idea of Freedom: New Essays on the Kantian Theory of Freedom, Oxford University Press. 2023.Famously, in the second Critique, Kant claims that our consciousness of the moral law provides us with sufficient grounds for the attribution of freedom to ourselves as noumena or things-in-themselves. In this way, while Kant insists that we have no rational basis to make substantive assertions about things-in-themselves from a theoretical point of view, it is rational for us to assert that we are noumenally free from a practical one. This much is uncontroversial. What is controversial is the co…Read more
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Diversifying philosophy: The art of non-dominationEducational Philosophy and Theory 51 (14): 1490-1503. 2019.Using the example of cross-cultural philosophy’s relation to disciplinary philosophy, this article seeks to think through some of the issues relevant to diversifying philosophy as an academic discipline. Guided by James Tully’s ruminations on non-domination, it attempts to make a case for a practice of philosophy which is more attuned to its social situatedness in a postindustrial, liberal society. Within this context, it argues that disciplinary philosophy must seek to contribute to making mean…Read more
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This book presents a comprehensive analysis of Kant’s justification of the categorical imperative. The book contests the standard interpretation of Kant’s views by arguing that he never abandoned his view about this as expressed in his Groundwork. It is distinctive in the way in which it places Kant’s argument in the context of his transcendental philosophy as a whole, which is essential to understand it as an argument from within human agential self-understanding. The book reviews that existing…Read more
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Nature, Ethics and Gender in German Romanticism and IdealismRowman & Littlefield International. 2018.
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Contextualising FichteFichte-Studien 45 133-153. 2018.An examination of the intellectual context in which Fichte develops his ethical program in the Jena period and its immediate aftermath reveals the determining presence of Leibniz, and the complex heritage of Leibnizian perfectionist thought from which Kantian, and post-Kantian, ethics seek to extricate themselves. While Kant blocks any reversion to the older, Leibnizian perfectionism, his criticisms leave open a space for a new kind of perfectionist ethic, one whose object is the promotion not o…Read more
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In Defense of ConscienceFichte-Studien 45 113-132. 2018.First in the Phenomenology and then in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel rejects Fichte’s notion of conscience on the grounds that it leads to despair. He also criticizes Fichtean conscience as purely “formal” and “abstract” and compatible with any content, which it can obtain only arbitrarily from the manifold of one’s natural drives and inclinations. For Hegel, there is an unresolvable tension between the claimed “universality” of a conscientious deed and the natural particularity…Read more
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The Whole of Reason in Kant’s Critical PhilosophyDialogue 58 (2): 251-286. 2019.Kant often compares reason to an organized body, which suggests that reason should be understood as a whole from which all possible uses of the faculties of reason are derived. However, Kant does not elaborate his conception of the whole of reason. Nor does the secondary literature. This paper suggests that the wholeness of reason is the apodictic modality of reason, i.e., the necessary standard that determines what can systematically belong to reason, and thus works as the systematic condition …Read more
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Respect for the Moral Law: the Emotional Side of ReasonPhilosophy 89 (1): 31-62. 2014.Respect, as Kant describes it, has a duality of nature that seems to embody a contradiction – i.e., it is both a moral motive and a feeling, where these are thought to be mutually exclusive. Most solutions involve eliminating one of the two natures, but unfortunately, this also destroys what is unique about respect. So instead, I question the non-cognitive theory of emotion giving rise to the contradiction. In its place, I develop the cognitive theory implicit in Kant's work, one in which emotio…Read more
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Kant's Synthetic and Analytic Method in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Distinction between Philosophical and Mathematical SynthesesEuropean Journal of Philosophy 23 (3): 728-749. 2013.This article addresses Kant's distinction between a synthetic and an analytic method in philosophy. I will first consider how some commentators have accounted for Kant's distinction and analyze some passages in which Kant defined the analytic and the synthetic method. I will suggest that confusion about Kant's distinction arises because he uses it in at least two different senses. I will then identify a specific way in which Kant accounts for this distinction when he is differentiating between m…Read more
APA Eastern Division
Toronto, ON, Canada
Areas of Specialization
1 more
19th Century Philosophy |
German Idealism |
Immanuel Kant |
Johann Gottlieb Fichte |
Indian Philosophy |
Romanticism |
PhilPapers Editorships
Kant: Ethics |
Johann Gottlieb Fichte |