Department of Philosophy

September 27, 2024

Esha Senchaudhuri is the Assistant Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities.  Her talk is titled,

"Algorithms and Democratic Deliberation: A Social Contract Approach."

Esha received her PhD in philosophy at the London School of Economics and Law Diploma focused on economic regulation from the University of London, and was an early career policy fellow in Humanities, Arts & American Institutions at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

November 22, 2024

P. Quinn White is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Prof. White writes,

“My research focuses on the ethics of love and relationships, which, I argue, is pretty much all of ethics. I have projects in honesty and discretion, partiality, consent, paying it forward, and forgiveness, as well as more applied projects on deception in the social science research and the politics of technology and privacy. I also have interests in love and the special permissions and obligations it can bring. And, perhaps more strangely, I explore the idea that love of all, agape, can serve as a (even the) central ideal of practical reasoning.”

March 14, 2025

Rafeeq Hasan is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Amherst College whose research focuses on the social and political dimensions of freedom. Prof. Hasan writes,

"The fundamental question that drives my scholarship is the question of what it means to be free. Many people think that freedom is fundamentally about me—i.e., they understand freedom as a quality of my choices and my life. I take the alternative view that freedom is about us. In other words, freedom requires just social and political arrangements and so can only be achieved by citizens acting together. In contexts ranging from Kant’s theory of property to contemporary debates about gentrification, my scholarship elaborates and defends the relevance of this vision of freedom for contemporary political philosophy and the broader world."

April 4, 2025

Abstract: This paper takes a close look at Kant’s response to Hume in the Prolegomena.  In an effort to reach readers who had failed to understand the first Critique, Kant pares away material that is not essential to his rejoinder.  Despite the relatively straightforward nature of much of his exposition in Prolegomena §§14-30, Kant’s account of the “origin” of <cause> (and with it his account of the meanings of all twelve of the categories) has still not been understood.  I argue that Kant has an account of the meaning of the categories that is sophisticated and novel in the milieu in which he was writing.  That he had some difficulty describing it is a partial cause of its still being unrecognized in the literature.  On Kant’s account, the meaning of a bare (i.e., unschematized) category is given by a fitting response-dependence formula.  The pattern can be illustrated using the category <existence> (which is simpler because it is not relational).  That bare category refers to the property [existence].  What is that property?  It is the property that is fittingly responded to with uses of the assertoric function of judgment, which is the function that corresponds to that category in the so-called Table of Judgments.  The paper will show how this account solves several problems for Kant.  Among other things, it allows for meaningful uses of the bare categories to think about things-in-themselves, while still retaining Kant’s commitment to noumenal ignorance.  The paper will highlight how this account of categorial meaning is interwoven with Kant’s response to Hume in the Prolegomena.

Timothy Rosenkoetter is an associate professor of philosophy at Dartmouth. He writes, 

"Kant is the focus of my historical research, one strand of which is a project that uses Kant’s theoretical philosophy and logic to develop a new approach to the foundations of his moral philosophy. Its central idea is that the latter, just as much as the former, is an investigation of our ability to cognize objects, albeit objects of a different kind, goods or ‘ought-to-bes’. Another strand of my historical research focuses on ways in which Kant understands his work as assimilating, and thereby improving, Christian Wolff’s now neglected philosophical project. I also have broad interests in ethics, metaethics, and axiology. A recent topic of attention has been the contrasting claims about value, its formal properties, and the bearers of value that are integral to the consequentialist and Kantian traditions. My teaching has been concentrated in ethics, the 19th century, logic -- and, of course, Kant"