I am Associate Professor in Philosophy at Temple University. I specialize in the history of modern philosophy, especially the work of Immanuel Kant and German Idealists. My systematic focus in these historical areas is in aesthetics and moral philosophy. More specifically, my research in Kant focuses on the problem of mutual dependence of theoretical and practical reason, or the fact that our theoretical cognition presupposes reason’s practical ends, the pursuit of the good, and vice versa. I am also interested in the reception of this problem in Early Romanticism and German Idealism. This topic has shaped my research in aesthetics, more precisely, my interest in the question of how aesthetics for Kant and the post-Kantian tradition exhibits the systematic character of reason. It has also directed my research in moral teleology, moral psychology, and teleology of nature. My other focus of research has been the conception of creative agency in Kant and the post-Kantian tradition, namely, the special normativity of creative production that goes beyond the minimum required for action and the metaphysics of freedom it presupposes.
I was a DAAD Fellow at Ludwig Maximilan University of Munich, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at LMU Munich, and, most recently, Fellow of the Forschungskoleg Analytic German Idealism at Leipzig University and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Leipzig University and Heidelberg University. I am also Philosophy Editor for the Society of German Idealism and Romanticism Review.