ON KANT & THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY:
(1) Book project: Kant and Women's Enlightenment: Feminist Critiques from 18th-Century Germany and Poland This project reshapes the way we think about Enlightenment: rather than viewing it primarily as the era of the emancipation of human reason, it emphasizes the gendered nature of the Enlightenment ideal of human progress and investigates how this ideal oppressed women. I take a critical look at this ideal from within intellectual debates of the time, examining how the restrictive view of women’s socio-political and educational opportunities was challenged by progressive female German and Polish thinkers of the late Enlightenment. The under-studied views of these thinkers exhibit insightful early-feminist arguments against women’s inability to take an active role in the Enlightenment project and the confinement of women to the “private” sphere of the household, in which they take care of men – “public”, free-thinking citizens. (2) Book project: Kant on the History and Development of Practical Reason Under contract with Cambridge University Press (Elements in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant series), due January 2024. This book will reconstruct Kant’s understudied views on the emergence and development of human reason and show that they provide important philosophical context for Kant’s well-known prescription to strive toward the gradual enlightenment of the individual and humankind as a whole. The book will also fill in a gap in the existing historical scholarship on the conjectural history genre (popularized by Hume and Rousseau), thereby fostering a dialogue between Kant scholars and other intellectual historians of the Enlightenment. (3) "Kant on the Origins of Humanity and Moral Education" Forthcoming, Journal of the History of Ideas. Kant’s views on human history have been widely studied, but commentators have rarely discussed his speculative account of humanity’s origins, assuming that it does not neatly fit into his critical philosophy. This paper challenges this assumption by defending two claims. First, Kant’s major essay on this topic, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” is a key component of his teleological understanding of human history and should be incorporated into the study of his critical philosophy. Second, the story of humanity’s origins informs Kant’s prescriptions for our moral education by better explaining individual development and providing guidelines for it. (4) "From Rationality to Morality: the Collective Development of Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Anthropology” Published in Kantian Review (2022), 27(3) and winner of the 2018 Markus Herz Prize awarded by the North American Kant Society. This paper extracts from Kant’s writings in anthropology, history, and pedagogy his teleological account of the history of human reason, and in particular his speculative account of the very emergence of our rational capacities. While Kant’s account of humankind’s rational progress has been widely discussed, his views about the way in which this progress might have begun and the circumstances surrounding this beginning have been largely neglected. Implicit in such an omission is the assumption that Kant does not say much about the very beginning of human history or that whatever he says is of little philosophical value. This paper challenges these assumptions. I reconstruct Kant’s account of the emergence of reason by looking at his various conjectural and more literal remarks about the transition our species underwent from mere irrational animals into primitive human beings who possess a rudimentary form of rationality. Next, I show how his account of the emergence of reason fits with his broader view of humankind’s rational progress and its subsequent stages. By doing so, I elucidate Kant’s guidelines for achieving this progress in the future by unifying them with his vision of reason’s past. (5) "Becoming Pluralists: Kant on the Normative Features of Pluralistic Thinking" Published in Kant Yearbook (2021), 13(1). This paper focuses on what Kant’s account of the history of reason tells us about his political and pedagogical guidelines for the continuance of humanity’s progress toward the fulfillment of its vocation and for the progress of any given individual. I explain the key role of education in reason’s development and I explore the conceptual relationship between the enlightenment of an individual person and the enlightenment of the human species as a whole. I then defend a novel interpretation of Kant’s notion of an enlightened or mature use of reason – the very goal of practical reason’s development – by connecting this notion to the three maxims of good thinking, the public use of reason, and the role of interpersonal communication in advancing our rational capacities. (6) "Expansion of Self-Consciousness in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason" Published in Kant Studien (2019), 110(4). This paper is a novel attempt at reconstructing Kant’s account of theoretical and practical self-consciousness from the Critique of Pure Reason in a way that makes evident its gradual expository progression, and at identifying the exact epistemic status of the two modes of self-consciousness: pure and empirical. In doing so, I trace the various stages of the gradual exposition of theoretical self-consciousness across three crucial parts of the first Critique: the Transcendental Deduction, the Refutation of Idealism, and the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. I show that the account of theoretical self-consciousness is not presented to us all at once; rather, it is progressively expanded and filled in across these three parts. Throughout my discussion I emphasize the importance of the distinction between the subject’s awareness of its existence in the sense of “Dasein” and the subject’s awareness of its existence in the sense of “Existenz”, which so far has been overlooked in the literature. ON CONTEMPORARY MORAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: (1) "Kant and Rawls on Moral Development" Conditional acceptance, Social Theory & Practice. In this paper I argue that Kant’s anthropological and pedagogical theory of moral development, and his empirical ethics more generally, largely influenced John Rawls’s early work. While various Kantian influences on Rawls have been discussed in the literature, these discussions have been limited to topics concerning a priori ethical considerations and their consequences for political philosophy. Even the rare discussions of Kant’s influence on Rawls’s views on the psychology of justice and his congruence argument leave Kant’s anthropological and pedagogical theory of moral development entirely out of the picture. In contrast to others who have interpreted Rawls’s Kantianism as his focus on a priori ethical considerations and their consequences for political philosophy, I show that what is equally important about Rawls’s Kantianism is his reliance on Kant’s anthropological theory of moral development, evident in Part III of A Theory of Justice. (2) "Universal Basic Income and Divergent Theories of Gender Justice" Published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (2022), 37(4). This paper focuses on the potential for basic income to become a tool for empowering women in the household and at the workplace. A recent debate among feminist political theorists showed that it is not obvious whether basic income has the potential to push our society toward socio-economic gender justice. I review feminist arguments for and against basic income in order to identify implicit beliefs about how women’s work should be conceived. I sort them into two categories: one concerned with the suitability of remuneration for caregiving, the other with the question of who should be responsible for caregiving. I conclude my discussion by commenting on the disparities and trends in the views endorsed by feminist supporters and critics of the policy. (3) “Disagree to Agree: Forming Consensus around Basic Income in Times of Political Divisiveness” Book chapter in Political Activism and Basic Income Guarantee (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). This paper, co-authored with A. Schwartz, concerns the growing political polarization in the U.S. and the challenges faced by political activists in their effort to mobilize around struggles and demands for policy changes. We argue that basic income can serve as a key policy around which social movements and political activists of different beliefs systems – feminist activists, racial justice activists, liberal egalitarians, Marxists-socialists, and libertarians – could form a consensus. This would allow them to have a common political goal without having to reach agreement over fundamental values, thus gaining more political visibility and increasing their ability to promote socio-political change. (4) "Electoral Competence, Epistocracy, and Standpoint Epistemologies. A Reply to Brennan" Published in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies (2021), 29(4), and shortlisted for the Policy, Expertise and Trust (PERITIA) Essay Prize. This paper concerns theories of democratic and epistocratic governance. Against a recent epistemic argument for epistocracy (J. Brennan, Against Democracy), which would enfranchise already dominant sexes, classes, and races, I defend the view that voter competence is a multi-faceted concept that tracks more than knowledge of economics and political science. I argue that it is a mistake to assume that socially disadvantaged and oppressed people, by virtue of lacking sufficient knowledge of social sciences, do not belong to the enfranchised group of citizens. This is because there is another way of being a competent voter, namely, by possessing first-personal experience and knowledge unique to, and acquired through, disadvantaged or oppressed situatedness. By drawing on feminist standpoint theory, I show that this kind of knowledge is necessarily first-personal and that it is relevant to political decision-making. Once voter competence is characterized more accurately and holistically, the problem of epistocracy’s implications of privileging already dominant sexes, classes, and races no longer arises. (5) "Sterilisation without Informed Consent: How to Improve European Citizens’ Medical Agency" Book chapter in Claiming Rights in Europe. Emerging Challenges and Political Agents (Routledge, 2018). I wrote this paper when I worked as a research assistant for the Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies at the National Italian Research Council. It discusses the importance of informed medical consent through a case study and examines the implications this case had for the medical rights of EU citizens. I start by describing a case of a Slovakian national of Roma origin against the Government of Slovakia, which appeared at the European Court of Human Rights in 2007-2012. After presenting the background of the case and the legal proceedings, I discuss the relevant national and European law in order to explain the positions of both sides and the rulings of the courts. I conclude by putting the case in a wider context of racial discrimination in the EU and providing a policy analysis regarding both the Slovakian and the European policies toward the Roma minority. |