About
- Gerad Gentry is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Baylor University specializing in metaethics (specifically action & agency), aesthetics, and theoretical philosophy in Kant and Hegel and their contemporary reception. He is director of Baylor's Philosophy, Literature, and Social Thought in Europe; Steering Committee Chair for the Texas Consortium in Classical German Philosophy; and President of The Society for German Idealism and Romanticism. Previously, he held Fulbright, DAAD, and Humboldt research fellowships and has been a fellow or associate at the University of Mainz, University of Chicago, Humboldt University of Berlin and Potsdam, University of Freiburg, and Yale University.
- He works on a broad conception of the normativity of action and agency that spans metaethics, aesthetics, and theoretical philosophy. He is interested in the relation between, necessity in, and developmental nature of action, rational agency, freedom, normativity itself, and flourishing. Across these areas, his research program develops a unified account of rational and animate form. He is interested in normativity not primarily as externally imposed constraints, but as arising from the constitutive conditions and self-determining activity of agents, and forms of minded life (the sociality of reason displayed in institutions, laws, nations, and the constitutive nature of these across time). He has received an University of Notre Dame visiting research grant for his work on Kant (2026) and an AvH Grant (2026) for the first conference in a collective research initiative on the relevance of Hegelian Constitutivism in contemporary metaethics and is the current editor of journal special issues with the Hegel Bulletin and The Monist.
- Select Publications:
- Hegel on Freedom and Ethical Life, Cambridge University Press, 2026.
- “Hegel and the Role of Literature in Ethical Theory” in Hegel and Literary Studies, edited by Allen Speight. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming: 1-26
- “Logical Form and Radical Skepticism: a Specter of Cassirer and Hegel in the 21st century” with Luigi Filieri, Inquiry, 2026: 1-24
- “Hegel’s End of Art and the Artwork as an Internally Purposive Whole” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 61(3), 2023: 473-498.
- "Artworks are Valuable for their own Sake" Journal of the American Philosophical Association: 9(2), 2023: 234-252
- "Pure Synthesis and the Principle of the Synthetic Unity of Apperception" Kant-Studien 113, no. 1, 2022: 8-39.
- “Activity and Actuality in the Life of the Mind: Hegel and the Greeks” Notre Dame Studies in the Philosophy of the Life of the Mind, edited by Katharina Kraus and Stephen Ogden. Springer, forthcoming: 1-33
- “Justice, Attunement, and the Ethics of Friendship” Symphilosophie, 2026: 203-227
- “Hegel’s Logic of Negation,” in Negation in Post-Kantian Philosophy, ed. by Moss, Springer, 2022: 397-419
- “Hegel’s Logic of Purposiveness,” Kantian Legacies in German Idealism. In Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, Routledge, 2021: 36-70.
- “The Ground of Hegel’s Logic of Life and the Unity of Reason: The Free Lawfulness of the Imagination” The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism. Ed. Gerad Gentry and Konstantin Pollok. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019: 148-172.
Gerad Gentry
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Assistant Professor
Director of Philosophy, Literature, and Social Thought in Europe
Baylor University
Steering Committee Chair for the Texas Consortium in Classical German Philosophy
President of The Society for German Idealism and Romanticism
Education
Ph.D. University of Cambridge, St. John's College
Ph.D. University of South Carolina
M.A. University of Chicago
B.A. Houghton College
