•  7
  •  10
    Kierkegaard’s Strong Anti-Rationalism: Offense as a Propaedeutic to Faith
    Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 27 (1): 193-214. 2022.
    In a now classic paper, Karen Carr argues that Kierkegaard is a religious “anti-rationalist”: He holds that reason and religious truth exist in necessary tension with one another. Carr maintains that this antagonism is not a matter of the logical incoherence of Christianity, but rather the fact that genuine submission to Christ precludes approaching him through demonstration. In this essay, we argue that while Kierkegaard is in fact an anti-rationalist, the literature has failed to appreciate th…Read more
  • Cambridge Critical Guide to Either-Or (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.
  •  8
    Reason and Conversion in Kierkegaard and the German Idealists
    with Christopher Iacovetti
    Routledge. 2020.
    In his late work Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Immanuel Kant struggles to answer a straightforward, yet surprisingly difficult, question: how is radical conversion--a complete reorientation of a person's most deeply held values--possible? In this book, Ryan S. Kemp and Christopher Iacovetti examine how this question gets taken up by Kant's philosophical heirs: Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and Kierkegaard. More than simply developing a novel account of each thinker's position, Kemp a…Read more
  •  30
    Kant on the bounds of promise making: A Mendelssohnian account
    European Journal of Philosophy 27 (2): 453-467. 2018.
    European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  33
    Reviving the no‐bad‐action problem in Kant's ethics
    European Journal of Philosophy 27 (2): 347-358. 2018.
    European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  18
    The Role of Imagination in Kierkegaard’s Account of Ethical Transformation
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 100 (2): 202-231. 2018.
    : In this essay, I argue that Kierkegaard endorses a “grace model” of ethical transformation – that radical normative change is not a function of agent-choice, rational or otherwise. After showing how grace functions in Kierkegaard’s account of religious transformation, I go on to argue that he offers a parallel account in the case of ethical conversion, the latter drawing from a description of transformation detailed in Kierkegaard’s Repetition. There we find an example of ethical transformatio…Read more
  •  37
    Kant's subjective deduction: A reappraisal
    European Journal of Philosophy 26 (3): 945-957. 2018.
    In the A-preface of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant kindly warns his readers to pay special attention to the chapter on the “Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding.” Looking to mitigate the reader's effort, Kant goes on to explain the chapter's methodology, suggesting that the inquiry will have “two sides.” One side deals with the “objective validity” of the pure categories of the understanding; he calls this the “objective deduction.” The other deals with the powers of cognition …Read more
  •  34
    Kierkegaard on the (Un)happiness of faith
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (3): 475-497. 2018.
    Hegel famously accuses Christianity of ‘unhappy consciousness’: it has a normative goal – union with the divine – that it cannot, in principle, satisfy. Kierkegaard was intimately aware of this criticism and, unlike some of Hegel’s other accusations, takes it seriously. In this paper my co-author and I investigate the way in which Kierkegaard addresses this issue in two texts published in 1843: Fear and Trembling and ‘The Expectancy of Faith’. We are especially interested in how the two texts de…Read more
  •  7
    Making Sense of the Ethical Stage: Revisiting Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic-to-Ethical Transition
    Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2011 (2011): 323-340. 2011.
    Davenport and Rudd’s 2001 publication of Kierkegaard After MacIntyre has been a catalyst for renewed interest in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. An issue that has received special attention is the Kierkegaardian transition from the aesthetic to ethical. In this paper, I examine the most recent and notable contributions to this discussion: the work of John J. Davenport, Anthony Rudd, and John Lippitt. After drawing attention to several explanatory gaps in Davenport and Rudd, I turn to provide my own acc…Read more
  •  47
    Desiderata for a Viable Secular Humanism
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 30 (2): 176-186. 2013.
    Philip Kitcher has recently worried that the New Atheists, by mounting an attack against religion tout court, risk alienating a large swath of ‘religious’ people whose way of life is, to Kitcher's mind, innocuous. Encouraging a more moderate response, Kitcher thinks certain non-threatening modes of religious existence should be protected. In this article, I argue that while Kitcher's attempt to provide balance to the secularism debate is a great service, he ultimately fails to distinguish innocu…Read more
  •  101
    In this paper, I argue that cases of radical selftransformation (cases in which an agent willfully changes a foundational element of their motivational structure) constitute an important philosophical puzzle. Though our inclination to hold people responsible for such changes suggests that we regard radical transformation as (in some sense) self-determined, it is difficult to conceive how a transformation that extends to the heart of an agent’s practical life can be attributed to the agent at all…Read more
  •  41
    How to become an idealist: Fichte on the transition from dogmatism to idealism
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (6): 1161-1179. 2017.
    In Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant claims that all human beings are originally and radically evil: they choose to adopt a ‘supreme maxim’ that gives preference to sensibility over the moral law. Because Kant thinks that all agents have a duty to develop good character, part of his task in the Religion is to explain how moral conversion is possible. Four years after Kant publishes the Religion, J. G. Fichte takes up the issue of conversion in slightly different terms: he is in…Read more
  •  16
    In Defense of a Straightforward Reading of Fear and Trembling
    Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2013 (1). 2013.
    Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 2013 Heft: 1 Seiten: 49-70.
  •  3
    In this paper I explore how three seemingly incompatible Kantian theses–a libertarian notion of freedom, the inscrutability of one’s fundamental moral maxim, and the ubiquity of evil–can each be maintained without contradiction. I do this by arguing against the popular notion that in his 'Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason,' Kant attributes 'radical evil' to all human beings.