Current Research Projects

My co-editors, Jim O'Shea (Dublin) and Luz Christopher Seiberth (Potsdam), and I are finalizing an edited volume of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars's writings titled Fraught with Ought; Writings on Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics. The volume includes some of his previously unpublished works recently discovered in his archive, as well as some of his most significant works that are not easily accessible. The volume is under contract with Oxford University Press and is planned for publication by the end of 2026. 

Many scholars from both the Kantian and cognitive science traditions consider Kant to be a great philosopher who anticipated current themes in cognitive science and AI. These themes include the distinction between percept and concept, the longstanding debate between conceptual and non-conceptual contents in perception, the notion of cognition and its defining elements, the notion of categories and the act of categorizing objects, and finally, the functionalist notion of the mind and its states. I agree that cognitive science can draw insights from Kant, such as the distinction between perception and concept. However, I disagree that Kant’s notion of the mind can be construed as functionalist, as is sometimes suggested. I am also interested in applying Kantian (and, for that matter, Sellarsian) conceptual tools to recent developments in AI. In a paper under review, I present a Kantian perspective on large language models (LLM). In a series of papers in progress, I propose a Kantian notion of the mind, which I call his sui generis mind. 

Sellars was one of the few great analytic philosophers who developed his philosophy in constant dialogue with Kant and wrote exegetical works that directly engaged with Kant's interpretation. In a series of works, I brought to light the Kantian elements of his philosophical system and his interpretation of Kant, placing them in the context of current literature. I recently co-edited a volume titled Reading Kant with Sellars and published two papers in this area: "Why Does Wilfrid Sellars Not Have a Transcendental Deduction?" and "Sellars's Master Argument for Conceptualism." Building on these previous works, I am currently working on a monograph that brings these two aspects of Sellars's philosophy into focus.