About

PROFESSIONAL: value theory (aesthetics, ethical theory), theoretical philosophy, and modern philosophy (Kant, Hegel, idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, and Neo-Aristotelianism)

I am interested in problems of foundational skepticism and adequate grounds; aesthetic theory and the role of art in ethics and concept formation; ethical theory, particularly virtue ethics and theories of kind-derived norms that manage to account for universal rights and unique responsibility relative to the kind in question. On the side, I am interested in such questions as the application of theories of identity and ethics to emergent forms of artificial intelligence.

I am a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (Assistant Professor equivalent) at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and lecturer at the University of Freiburg. Previously, I was an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin and Potsdam, visiting Associate to Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago (2018-2021), Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lewis University (2018-2020). Fulbright, DAAD, and AvH. PhD awarded August 2018.

Select Publications:
2023. "Hegel's End of Art and the Artwork as an Internally Purposive Whole" Journal of the History of Philosophy, 61(3): 473-498 (open access).
2023. "Artworks are Valuable for their own Sake" Journal of the American Philosophical Association: 9(2): 234-252 (open access).
2023. “Goethe’s Theory of Art: Rethinking Organic Wholes and Architecture” Bloomsbury History of Modern Aesthetics
2022. "Pure Synthesis and the Principle of the Synthetic Unity of Apperception" Kant-Studien 113, no. 1: 8-39
2022. “Hegel’s Logic of Negation,” in Negation in Post-Kantian Philosophy, ed. by Moss, Springer: 397-419
2021. “The Concept of Life in German Idealism and its Aristotelian Roots” Intellectual History Review 31, no. 3: 379-390.
2019. “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

– Reviewed by the Hegel Bulletin, Kant-Studien, and the Journal of the History of Philosophy

My professional service includes serving as a member of the American Philosophical Association program committee ('20-21), refereeing articles for the Journal of the History of Philosophy, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Southern Journal of Philosophy, and the University of Cambridge; currently serving as president of the Society for German Idealism and Romanticism (www.thesgir.org) and Springer Book Series Co-Editor (with Allen Speight): Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

USA Fulbright Fellow, DAAD Gastprofessor, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.

"...To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

And indeed there will be time

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question"

T.S. Eliot

Gerad Gentry

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Gerad Gentry, Ph.D.

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