Paul Guyer

It is with great pleasure that IFILNOVA will receive Professor Paul Guyer for a conference which will be held next 31st of March.

In his paper – “Moral Worth and Moral Motivation: Kant’s Real View” – Paul Guyer will argue against Barbara Herman’s view of commitment to the moral law as a “second-order”, limiting condition on the agent’s independently given, first-order motives. Instead, he argues that the agent’s commitment to the moral law shapes her motives, and thus is more of a foundation for than a limitation on the agent’s motivation and conduct. He appeals to Kant’s “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” and the late “Metaphysics of Morals” to develop this interpretation.

Professor Paul Guyer is the Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Brown University. His interests include all areas of the philosophy of Kant, modern philosophy more generally, and the history of aesthetics. He is the author of nine books on Kant, including “Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals” (2007), and “Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume” (2008). He is the editor of six anthologies of work on Kant, including three Cambridge Companions, and is also the co-translator of “The Critique of Pure Reason”, “The Critique of the Power of Judgment”, and Kant’s “Notes and Fragments”. His “A History of Modern Aesthetics” in three volumes appeared in 2014. He is a past president of the American Society for Aesthetics, a Research Prize Winner of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.