Steffi Schadow is a research and teaching fellow at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf, Germany. She was also an interim professor for the history of philosophy in Siegen, Germany, and for practical philosophy in Marburg, Germany. In her work, she focuses on Kant and Hume, as well as on the history of moral philosophy, metaethics, moral psychology, and contemporary virtue ethics. One aim of her philosophical work is to constructively relate current debates and relevant historical positions when discussing fundamental questions in ethics and moral psychology. In her 2010 book on Kant's concept of respect (de Gruyter), she puts forward an in…
Steffi Schadow is a research and teaching fellow at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf, Germany. She was also an interim professor for the history of philosophy in Siegen, Germany, and for practical philosophy in Marburg, Germany. In her work, she focuses on Kant and Hume, as well as on the history of moral philosophy, metaethics, moral psychology, and contemporary virtue ethics. One aim of her philosophical work is to constructively relate current debates and relevant historical positions when discussing fundamental questions in ethics and moral psychology. In her 2010 book on Kant's concept of respect (de Gruyter), she puts forward an interpretation of Kant's theory of motivation. According to this interpretation, the theory is not only of interest within Kant's own work, but also makes a valuable contribution to contemporary theory of practical normativity. In her habilitation thesis, "Sentimental Normativity: Hume's Theory of Obligation" (2025, forthcoming), she proposes an interpretation of Hume's concept of moral normativity according to which Hume combines a sentimentalist approach to ethics with an objectivist understanding of moral obligation. As such, it can also account for the particular phenomenology of morality within a naturalistic framework and proves to be a remarkably constructive alternative to rigid metaethical categories such as sentimentalism and subjectivism on the one hand, and rationalism and objectivism on the other. She is currently focusing her work on the moral philosophy of Kant and Hume, as well as contemporary virtue theory, with a particular focus on the work of Philippa Foot.
