Philosophy of Art

I work on the history of modern philosophy, especially Kant, and on the history of aesthetics. I have worked on Kant's epistemology and metaphysics, his moral and political theory, and on his aesthetics, and on issues in both epistemology and aesthetics in a wide range of other authors. I am also one of the General Co-Editors of the Cambridge Edition of Kant, for which I have translated several volumes of Kant's works. My recent works include the first English translation of an extensive selection of Kant's posthumous Notes and Fragments (2005), a survey of Kant, called simple Kant (2006), a Reader's Guide to Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (2007), and three collections of my essays, Kant's System of Nature and Freedom (2005), Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (2005), and Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume (2008). I am currently working on a history of modern aesthetics from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, tentatively entitled Truth and Play. Beyond that, I am planning to write a book on the impact of Kant's moral philosophy on the subsequent history of philosophy.

In addition to teaching all areas of Kant on a regular rotation, I teach a rotation of courses on eighteenth-, nineteenth-. and twentieth-century aesthetics.  I also teach eighteenth-century British moral philosophy. 

My research focuses on thoughts and utterances that don’t fit standard propositional models. I am especially interested in cognitive "perspectives", in which one thought structures our overall understanding of a topic in a way that's similar to the way a concept like duck or rabbit can structure our perceptual experience. I've thought most about perspectives in our understanding of metaphor and fiction, but I'm also working on their role in emotions and the self. In addition, I am interested in the thought of non-human animals, in thought that takes place in maps rather than sentences, and in sarcasm and slurs.