Gerad Gentry

About

PROFESSIONAL: I am currently an Alexander von Humboldt Faculty Fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Universität-Potsdam (2020-22) with a TT post in philosophy at Lewis University in Chicago and a Visiting Associate in Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. Previously, I was a Bilinski Fellow and Research Visitor (VAR) in the philosophy department at Yale University, and a Fulbright scholar in Germany.

AOS: I specialize in systematic conceptions of purposiveness in theories of self-consciousness, ethics, nature, and aesthetics. Within the history of philosophy I focus on Kant and Hegel. I am interested in the effects of systematic notions of becoming and formation from Heraclitus and Aristotle through Kant, Hegel, and Goethe to Gadamer, Cassirer, Kuhn, and Philippa Foot.
I am interested in comparative ethics and normative theories that manage to be both universal and developmental, and theories of time and identity, scientific paradigms, and the formative value of the fine arts for self-consciousness and society. Within applied ethics, I am interested in theories of kind-derived norms that can account for universal rights and unique responsibility relative to the kind in question. I am also interested in the application of theories of identity and ethics to emergent forms of artificial intelligence; and the conditions of intelligibility for all possible, even non-human forms of self-consciousness.

WORK: Selected publications include articles on the epistemology of Kant and Hegel including for the Kant Studien (forthcoming), the forthcoming Kantian Legacies in German Idealism edited for the Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (Routledge, 2021), co-editor of the Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism, (Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Art, Nature, and Self-formation in the Age of Goethe (de Gruyter, forthcoming). I also serve as president of the Society for German Idealism and Romanticism. Other work includes serving as editor for several peer-reviewed journals: (1) SGIR Review (2017-present), (2) the Yale Law School: Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities (2017-18), (3) Evental Aesthetics (2017-present); and have served as a (4) referee for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, (5) reviewer for the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and (6) program committee for the central American Philosophical Association.

PERSONAL: I love time with my spouse and kids, particularly in nature and in diverse cultures globally. Activities include tennis, soccer, sprint-triathlons, pottery, photography, sculpting, and cross-country skiing. I love literature, from the novels of Dostoevsky to the poems of T.S. Eliot; from the short stories of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to the epic myths of J.R.R. Tolkien.