Research Highlights

Currently, there are three main topics in my research, two of which concern the philosophy of Kant, while the third is located in the contemporary field of meta-ethics.

With regard to Kant’s theoretical philosophy, I am trying to understand his so-called transcendental idealism, and here in particular his distinction of appearances and things in themselves. He has often been criticized for this doctrine, but I think it is actually quite straightforward. Recently, there have been suggestions in the secondary literature that this distinction is concerned with different types of properties: an appearance is a thing consisting of properties of one type, a thing in itself is a thing consisting of properties of a second type. One idea of distinguishing these two types of properties is to ask whether they are subject-dependent or not. In whatever way one attempts to distinguish these two types, in my opinion any such strategy needs to be complemented by an account of different kinds of cognitive subjects. According to Kant, we humans can know things only insofar as they causally interact with us, for example in perception, while there is at least the possibility of a cognitive subject which is free from this restriction. My main idea is that investigating the sophisticated theories of divine cognition, developed in scholasticism, i.e. the philosophical tradition of the Middle Ages, can help us understand Kant in this respect, even if this goes against the grain of the widespread picture of Kant as a philosopher who made a clean break with the past.

As far as Kant’s moral theory is concerned I aim at a proper assessment of the role of the famous categorical imperative therein. The categorical imperative says: always act in such a way that you can at the same time will your maxim to become a universal law. First of all, it is not obvious what this means, but many commentators think that it amounts to claiming that with each and every agent, their reason or will ‘legislates’ all the valid moral norms. In my view, by contrast, Kant’s goal is much more modest. We should have a critical attitude towards all putative norms, and the categorical imperative is something like a principle of caution. If we stick to it, we can be sure not to do anything morally wrong. Kant famously tries to ‘derive’ the categorical imperative through an analysis of what it means to have a good will. Here again, scholastic ideas can help us understand what Kant has in mind. According to a widespread opinion in scholasticism, a good will is a will which follows right reason. Reason is here pertinent in its action-guiding role: before acting we are supposed to make sure that what we plan to do is correct and this correctness has many dimensions, one of them being the motive of the action. It is not enough to do what is morally correct: one needs to do it for the right motive. For Kant, the right motive is respect for the law, and the law in question is the principle of caution.

The third topic concerns the relationship between morality and truth. Assuming that in a certain situation somebody has the duty to help someone else, it seems appropriate to say that it is true that this person has the obligation to help the other person. The question is then: What does it mean for such a statement to be true? Are there moral facts which make it true? This question very quickly leads to fundamental issues: Is there only one conception of truth which fits all the academic disciplines or is truth in some sense domain-specific? If so, does this in any way water down truth? In my view, this is not the case, and I am trying to find suitable arguments for this opinion.