Dissertation: Transcendental Logic and the Birth of the Critical Philosophy

My dissertation concerns Kant’s mature account of the logical sources of metaphysics. Topics covered include Kant’s account of intellectual concept formation, the syntheticity of Kant’s method in the Critique of Pure Reason and its analogy with epigenesis, the derivation of the members of the tables of judgment and categories from the nature of discursive thinking, and the relation between the categories and various other central concepts of Kant’s theoretical philosophy and their objects (the concept of an object of sensible intuition, of an object in general, of a thing, of a thing in itself, and of the highest and most perfect thing, God). In future work I wish to develop these projects into a monograph, presenting the Kantian doctrine of the “parthenogenesis” (or virgin birth) of transcendental philosophy as the fruit of Kant’s “lifelong love affair” with metaphysics, the Queen of the sciences.

Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy (in progress)

• Scepticism and the Synthetic Method

• The Birth of Concepts: Kant on Comparison and Concept Formation

• From the Customary Technique of the Logicians to Kant’s Pure General Logic

• Qualitative Unity and the Concept of an Object

• Kant on Synthetic Division

• Kant’s Proof of the Completeness of the Table of Judgments

• The Limits of the Categories

• God and the Categories

  Other projects in their early stages include work on Kant’s criticism of the paralogisms of rational psychology, on the transcendental deduction of the categories, on Kant’s theology, and on Kant’s derivations of the ideas of reason from the species of syllogism.

Kant’s Practical Philosophy (in progress)

• Kant’s Katabasis: The Idea of Freedom and its Reality in Groundwork III

• Kant on Slavery and the Scope of Moral Personhood (2025 Marcus Herz prize finalist)

• Kant on Abortion

• Teleology in Kant’s Ethics

  I am in addition developing further research projects on the foundations of Kant’s practical philosophy, on the formulas of the moral law and their unity, on the role of teleology in Kant’s practical philosophy, and on Kant’s account of property, of punishment, and of the relation between the doctrine of right and the doctrine of virtue.

Kant’s Philosophy of Nature (in progress)

• Kant on Race and the Archaeology of Nature

  In future work I intend to develop a longer term research project on Kant on the special laws of nature, on Kant’s account of body and the dynamical underpinnings of his account of soul-body interaction, and on Kant’s account of life and organism.