Associate Professor of Philosophy

(Fall 2025)

René Descartes’ iconic statement “I think, therefore I am”, known as the Cartesian cogito, is perhaps the single best recognized, if not best understood, piece of reasoning in the history of philosophy. Descartes’ insight is that my awareness of my own mental activity (thoughts, emotions, beliefs, doubts, volitions etc.) is self-certifying such that I cannot doubt the veracity of my claim that “I think”. Much less known and studied than the Cartesian cogito is a more ambitious version of it developed by Immanuel Kant, expressible by the statement: “I act, therefore I am free”. Kant argues that my self-consciousness about my activity compels me to conceive myself as the free agent of that activity.  I am writing a monograph, Kant’s Freedom Cogito: The Normative Force of the I, which will offer an intensive study of this historically underappreciated but fascinating argument in the context of Kant’s overall intellectual development, and an interpretation of the unexpectedly important place it comes to occupy in his mature moral philosophy. The most inspiring lesson to take from Kant’s cogito is what I call the “normative force” of the “I”, that is, the idea that one’s necessary self-conception as free comes with a transformative attitude that motivates one to place oneself under the obligation to follow justifiable doxastic as well as practical norms or standards. Thus, Kant’s cogito sets out to prove not only that one must conceive oneself as free but also that this self-conception is self-liberating.