In academic year 2023-2024, I am on leave on a Humboldt fellowship, hosted by the University of Potsdam (Lehrstuhl: Thomas Khurana)

I came to Penn from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where I was an Assistant Professor. My interests are both historical (Kant, as well as 19th-20th centuries) and thematic (issues in ethics, social critique, aesthetics, philosophy of science). These are reflected in the two main projects I am currently working on:

1) Practical reasoning as reflective.  An interpretation of the Kantian moral system as encompassing bottom-up reflection on the nature and scope of universals, and thus not limited to determining or deriving particular cases, features, or duties. If we take seriously Kant's claim that the metaphysics of morality is analogous to the metaphysics of science, then this suggests that both systems are importantly regulative or reflective as well as derivational or constitutive -- where, in both domains, this entails areas of indeterminacy and epistemic opacity in subjective conceptions of universals.

My work in this area examines Kant's conception of moral ideas of reason, as distinct from principles or ordinary moral concepts; practical reasoning as encompassing reflective judgment; the shift in Kant's conceptions of autonomy and the unity of reason during the 1790s away from an emphasis on derivation from principles; Kant's conception of moral culture and conceptual revision in the Critique of Judgment. It also extends thematically to other figures: e.g., Simone de Beauvoir's characterization of what I term 'moral unintelligibility', or to Karl Marx's critique of moral (abstract) universals.

2) The revisable a priori. Kant's conception of the a priori has come under continuous attack in the 19th and 20th centuries, on both philosophical and historico-scientific grounds: e.g., we no longer think that Euclidean geometry is a universal and necessary a priori truth. However, I am interested, first, in how Kant's conception of the a priori, as indissociable from a broader theory of the structuring activity of the mind, comes apart from the contemporary appropriation of the a priori, and second, in whether Kant's own evolving conception of the a priori ultimately allows for some degree of relativization in the philosophy of science.

I am also interested in applications of this conception beyond the philosophy of science, as well as its post-Kantian legacy. I am working on a paper with Chloé de Canson in which we claim that ideology, particularly as conceived in the Marxist tradition, is best understood not as an isolated item or datum of cognition (such as a belief, or a component or set thereof), but instead in terms of an a priori, itself the product of the structuring activity of the mind, by which experience can first show up as meaningful or intelligible at all. A forthcoming book chapter builds on this work by examining Marx's materialism as itself a form of idealism, connecting to prior work on normativity and knowledge claims (by way of JL Austin and Robert Brandom).