Katharina Kraus is Miller Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Miller Department of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, where she is also Associated Faculty of the German Program in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Before moving to Hopkins in January 2023, she taught for six years at the University of Notre Dame, where she also served as a member of the steering committee of the newly established History of Philosophy Forum. Before that, she taught at the University College Freiburg of the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg and was a post-doctorial fellow of the Martin Buber Society at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

After her studies of physics, mathematics, and philosophy, she received a Diplom in physics (including a BA and MA equivalent) from the Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg in 2008, a MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science in 2010 and a PhD in philosophy in 2014, both from the University of Cambridge.

Kraus is the author of Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and numerous articles on Kant’s theoretical philosophy. She is currently working on a short monograph on Kant’s Ideas of Reason (Cambridge Elements Series). In her new research project, The Life of the Mind, she examines theories of mental development and personal growth in the tradition of transcendental philosophy and philosophy of life that model the mind on a conception of life and place particular emphasis on mental or spiritual life (“geistiges Leben”). More recently, she has developed a strong interest in the work of women philosophers of the German tradition in the long nineteenth century and studies in particular Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) and Edith Stein (1891–1942).

Her systematic research interests include topics such as self-consciousness, the first-person perspective, personal identity, and self-constitution, as well as analytic theories of expressivism, contextualism, and perspectivalism.