Research

My research is primarily concerned with the history of modern philosophy, focusing especially on Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) as well as on other thinkers of the European Enlightenment (e.g., John Locke and Gottfried W. Leibniz). More recently, I have begun to explore selected post-Kantian traditions of thought from the 19^th and 20^th centuries, especially Dilthey’s philosophy of life, Gadamer’s hermeneutics, and the phenomenology of Edith Stein.

In systematic respects, I examine issues in philosophy of mind, such as self-consciousness, self-knowledge, and personhood, as well as in epistemology and philosophy of science, such as the contextuality of knowledge and methodological issues of psychology.

A major goal of my research is to combine textually accurate interpretations of historical works with systematic analyses of the underlying philosophical positions. In particular, I apply methods and concepts from analytic philosophy of language to the study of historical positions (e.g., expressivism and contextualism). In turn, the classical texts also serve me as important sources of ideas for developing answers to current questions in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of science.

In my book Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, I present a new interpretation of Kant’s theories of self-consciousness, self-knowledge, and the self-formation of human individuals. I have also published numerous articles on Kant’s theoretical philosophy in journals such as Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, European Journal of Philosophy, and Noûs.