Current Research Projects

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 Doesn't Wilfrid Sellars 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.

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. In a series of papers, I examine these claims more closely. While I agree that cognitive science can find insights in Kant, such as the distinction between percept and concept, I disagree that Kant’s notion of the mind can be construed as functionalist. 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 the sui generis mind. 

Although Kant had always considered the three Critiques to be the culmination of his critical project, in the final years of his life, he realized there was a gap in the system he had developed (which he compared to the pain of Tantalus). He began working on a new book, which he considered to be his most important work. He changed the title several times but at the end was unable to finish it before he died. The manuscript was published posthumously as Opus Postumum. I’m interested in what he calls the Selbstsetzungslehre or the self-positing doctrine in this work, and I'm trying to determine the nature of the self and positing in question, as well as their theoretical and practical consequences.