Regular Members
Pauline Kleingeld
Project Leader My academic interests are in Kant and Kantian philosophy, and more broadly in ethics, political philosophy, and moral psychology. I’ve published two monographs: Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge UP, 2012) and a book on Kant’s philosophy of history: Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants (Königshausen und Neumann, 1995). More recently, I have been working on foundational issues in Kant’s moral theory, such as the different formulations of the Categorical Imperative, the notion of autonomy, and the idea of freedom. A recurring theme is the importance of Kant’s republicanism, not just for understanding his legal and political philosophy, but also for understanding the foundations of his moral theory. |
Fiorella Tomassini
Postdoctoral Researcher Fiorella's research activity has been centered on Kant's theory of right and its relationship with the German natural law tradition of the 18th century. She is also interested in Kant's reception of Rousseau's theory of social contract, the notion of the general will within his moral and political philosophy, and his theory of property. Fiorella received her PHD from the University of Buenos Aires (2018). Before joining the University of Groningen in October 2020, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Buenos Aires and held a visiting position at the Martin-Luther University of Halle (September 2018- August 2019), supported by a DAAD fellowship and the Marie-Curie Rise project "Kant in South America". |
Janis Schaab
Postdoctoral Researcher Janis completed his PhD at St Andrews/Stirling in 2019, with a thesis on Kantian constructivism. From 2019 to 2020, he was a Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at UCL. His research primarily focuses on Kantian approaches to ethical theory, but also branches out into adjacent fields like political philosophy. He has published papers on duties to oneself, commitments, rights, and the second-person standpoint. Recently, Janis has developed an interest in the philosophy of conspiracy theories. For more information, visit his personal website. |
Marijana Vujosevic
Postdoctoral Researcher Marijana Vujošević is currently a lecturer at Utrecht University. Starting from August, she will work as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen and as a university lecturer in practical philosophy at Leiden University. Her work contributes to ethics, history of philosophy and contemporary moral psychology. She received her PhD from the University of Groningen in June 2017. In her dissertation, she combined a historical approach to Kant’s ethics with contemporary moral psychology. Her aim was to modify the standard picture of Kant’s moral theory as to accommodate the point that it contains a moral psychology that is also relevant to maxim adoption. In her articles, she has highlighted overlooked aspects of Kant’s concepts of conscience, self-control, virtue, moral feeling, moral strength and weakness. She also attempts to show that some of these concepts are relevant to contemporary moral psychology. |
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Vinicius Carvalho
PhD Candidate Vinicius’ PhD research assesses the viability of a constitutivist reading of Kant’s moral theory, both on textual as well as on philosophical grounds (especially in comparison to contemporary constitutivist theories, of Kantian and non-Kantian inspiration). Vinicius is mainly interested in moral theory and metaethics. Before coming to Groningen, he completed his Master’s at the University of Campinas, with a thesis on Kant’s derivations of the Formula of Universal Law in the Groundwork. |
Affiliated Members
Sabina Vaccarino Bremner
Assistant Professor, History of Philsophy, University of Groningen Sabina works broadly in Kant's ethics and Kant's Third Critique (branching, at times, into issues in epistemic normativity and Kant's theoretical philosophy), as well as on post-Kantian European philosophy. Sabina's current project defends a Kantianism that espouses an ethics of principles while emphasizing the role of revising moral principles, tracing the resources for this view in Kant’s account of reflective judgment. Reflective judgment, on this account, involves both the incorporation of new moral particulars into a standing moral conceptual repertoire and the revision of moral universals on the basis of such alterations. The alteration of moral universals and accommodation of recalcitrant particulars are among the operations of what Sabina terms the ‘reflective dimension’ of practical reasoning, alongside the moral dimension of application of a priori moral principle typically taken to constitute the whole of Kant's moral philosophy. |
Suzanna Jacobi
Phd Candidate, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, University of Groningen Bioethics has tried, from its beginning, to operate independently of theoretical discussions within moral philosophy. However, this ‘anti-theoretical’ tendency has resulted in methods of justification in which theoretical argumentation has been replaced by appeal to common morality and intuition, which are deeply contested as ethical starting points. The main aim of Suus’ project is to critically analyze this 'move away from theory' in bioethics, and, more importantly, to explore the possibility of a Kantian approach to moral justification in bioethics that is a) not problematically dependent on moral intuitions, b) defensible from an ethical point of view, but also c) sensitive to feasibility-constraints and action-guiding for complex bioethical cases. |
Lu Zhao
Visiting Doctoral Researcher, Shandong University, China Lu is a visiting Ph.D student from Shandong University, China. At present, Lu is working with Pauline Kleingeld to study Kant’s practical philosophy. Lu's research is concerned with Kant's moral and political philosophy. The main work Lu is currently doing is to present a systematic interpretation of Kant’s cosmopolitanism in his whole philosophy system. |