Murphy-Philosophy Seminar: Rachel Zuckert (Northwestern University)

Rachel Zuckert is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. Their research focuses on Kant and his philosophical context, broadly understood: both his eighteenth-century contemporaries, and post-Kantian, nineteenth-century philosophy. 

Zuckert's research has concentrated most on the Critique of Judgment, including work on Kant’s aesthetics, philosophy of biology, and questions concerning the possibility of empirical knowledge. Recently, I have been working on a collection of essays concerning the aspirational character of reason on Kant’s view: on the ideas of reason as presenting goals for scientific explanation, orienting the agent to moral life as a never-to-be-completed task, as restlessly driving historical change, or felt as precarious self-transcendence in the aesthetic experience of the sublime. 

Organized by the Tulane Philosophy Department, the Murphy-Philosophy Seminars are a series of workshops where CE Faculty Fellows and distinguished guest speakers present works in progress on ethics, political philosophy, political theory, moral psychology, the philosophy of law, and intellectual history. Papers are distributed one week beforehand to the participants who read the paper and prepare discussion questions for the presenter.