Monographs:
1. Hegel on Freedom and Ethical Life, Cambridge University Press, 2026. 83 pages.
Hegel on Freedom and Ethical Life argues that Hegel’s idea of freedom inherits and expands on key features of the Kantian principle of the autonomy of the will and the inner conditions of freedom, along with an Aristotelian principle of action and human flourishing, altering both through the broadly skeptical method informed by Sextus Empiricus, in a way that facilitates a compelling alternative in the current metaethical landscape and a unique range of insights about the nature of action, rational agency, and the ethical life. This work thus lays out the core features of Hegel’s constitutivism and its relative strengths, setting it in helpful contrast with constructivist (e.g., Rawls, Korsgaard, Bagnoli) notions of action and rational agency. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
I am at work on two other monographs on normativity, action, and agency, both of which I expect to have finished in 2027.
Volumes:
2. Gentry, Gerad, Mattias Pirholt and Camilla Flodin (Eds). Art, Nature, and Self-formation in the Age of Goethe, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024. 305 pages.
This volume brings together leading interdisciplinary scholars globally to explore Goethe’s impact on western thought through ideas of organic and aesthetic formation; methods of biology, reason, becoming, and Bildung; modes of self-conscious comportment to nature, art, and the self; and conceptions of finitude and divinity. This volume underscores the interdisciplinary impact of Goethe’s thought and work. Of particular note is Goethe's unified and non-reductive account of nature, human education, social life, and reason.
3. Gentry, Gerad. (Ed). Kantian Legacies in German Idealism. In Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2021. 288 pages.
This volume brings together an original set of critical reflections on the role that the German Idealists ascribe to fundamental Kantian ideas and insights within their own systems. A central motivation for this volume is to resist reductive accounts of the complex relationship between German Idealism and Kant’s Idealism through a study of the inheritance of Kant’s legacy in German Idealism.
4. Gentry, Gerad and Konstantin Pollok (Eds). The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2019. 278 pages.
This is the only critical volume engaging one of the most important features of Kant and post-Kantian idealism: the imagination. For philosophers of German idealism and early German romanticism, the imagination is central to issues ranging from hermeneutics to transcendental logic and from ethics to aesthetics. This volume of new essays brings together comprehensive and critical reflections on the significances of the imagination during this period, with essays on Kant and the imagination, the imagination in post-Kantian German idealism, and the imagination in early German romanticism. The essays explore the many and varied uses of the imagination and discuss whether they form a coherent or shared notion or whether they embody points of philosophical divergence within these traditions. They shed new light on one of the most important and enigmatic aspects of human nature, as understood in the context of a profoundly influential era of western thought.
Select Peer-review Journal Articles and Chapters
5. “Hegel and the Role of Literature in Ethical Theory” in Hegel and Literary Studies, edited by Allen Speight. Cambridge University Press, in production, 2027: 1-26
This piece defends the relevance of literature for ethical theory through an examination of the paradoxical role of literature that Hegel defends in metaethics. Although Hegel denies that literary art can be defined by an external end or moral purpose while remaining what it is, he paradoxically holds that literature discloses the truth of ethical life and rational agency. I argue that this tension is resolved once literature is understood as a constitutive condition of Hegel’s dialectic account of action rather than as a vehicle for moral instruction. Literary form facilitates a particular mode of formation of rational agency. I argue that Hegel’s account of literature bears a necessary metaethical function with implications extending beyond Hegel’s dialectic constitutivism. I take up discussions of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” to further demonstrate Hegel’s thesis that literature’s formative role lies in the aesthetic process by which it opens up and conditions metaethical formation, rather than in explicitly moral content.
6. “Logical Form and Radical Skepticism: a Specter of Cassirer and Hegel in the 21st century” with Luigi Filieri, Inquiry, 2026: 1-24
A presupposition of radical skepticism has dominated philosophical methods of the past century. For example, Quine’s influential embrace of the “Neurathian Procedure” can be seen as an implicit acknowledgement of the unanswerability of the Agrippan Trilemma. It is a presupposition not only of logical positivism and Quine’s brand of empiricism, but also one that is shared by a range of epistemological traditions after him. We question this presuppositional dogma and identify a possible strategy for answering radical skepticism, that emerges in a unique form between the neo-Kantianism of Cassirer and the post-Kantianism of Hegel.
7. “Justice, Attunement, and the Ethics of Friendship” Symphilosophie, 2026: 203-227
Aristotle argues that when persons are truly friends, they have no need of justice, whereas when they are merely just, they still need friendship. This suggests that friendship of a certain kind does not merely accompany justice but, in some sense, contains and surpasses it. It surpasses or rather fulfills it in virtue of the actualization of the very ends toward which justice aims. Of particular note is Aristotle’s account of a state [hexis] of complete friendship as the condition in which symphilosophia, a certain kind of activity of such friends is possible. This feature of Aristotle’s notion of friendship was taken up and modified in the thought of a sub-set of moderns in the Enlightenment era: the German Romantics. I take up Friedrich Schiller’s account of this distinctive activity in what he calls the “aesthetic state” [ästhetischer Staat], wherein a certain activity of mutual-attunement in a certain kind of friendship that includes both sense and thought embodies a kind of loving, reflective comportment. I argue Schiller’s unique modification of this Aristotelian idea lays out a certain normative principle internal to friendship, which, there is reason to think, is inseparable from an adequate conception of justice and the social good.
8. “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, in production 2027: 1-33
I argue that Hegel is (among other things) reintroducing and transforming three Greek sources—Heraclitean becoming, Pyrrhonian skepticism, and, above all, Aristotle’s conception of energeia and entelekheia—reworked through Hegel’s critical dialectic method. Hegel’s decisive innovation is to ground actuality in a method that internalizes the demands of radical skepticism, thereby transforming Aristotelian actuality into a dialectic, constitutive process of norm governed, self-determination. On this view, genuine knowledge, freedom, and minded activity are not static states but moments in the developmental life of the mind, whose conceptual necessity becomes actual only through its realization in concrete existence.
9. “Moral Normativity and Non-self-conscious Agency of Artificial Intelligence” special issue Epistemic Identity and Epistemic Virtue: Human Mind and Artificial Intelligence, Vodka Strahovnik and the Centre for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the Ethics of New Technologies, Bloomsbury, in production 2027: 1-18
This paper develops an account of non-human moral agency, defining the conditions on which AI need not possess self-consciousness to be morally responsible if its exhibits genuine self-determining activity (capacity to self-determine core parameters and data sets for its own sake), through which it constitutes an actuality subject to the inner, kind-normative standards of virtue and the common good. It therefore distinguishes the merely mimetic acts of self-determination exhibited by current MM-LLMs from genuine artificial agency, arguing that even under an exceptionalism metaphysics that denies self-consciousness to AI, sufficiently self-determining forms of artificial intelligence could nevertheless possess a non-reductive form of agency governed by necessary standards of virtue.
10. “Hegel’s Theory of Time.” Open Philosophy Special Issues: The Human Being and the Being of Time, de Gruyter, 7, 2024: 1-13.
While sharing some features in common with presentist accounts of time, Hegel’s theory of time fundamentally offers an alternative to standard A-Theories, B-Theories, and C-Theories of time. While compatible with Kantian ideality of time on the one hand and spacetime in the theory of general relativity on the other, Hegel’s theory of time reaches beyond both a transcendental form of sensibility on the one hand and a paradigm for material motion in physics, on the other. Further, while Hegel’s theory of time provides reason to reject such theories of time as the Moving Spotlight, Growing and Shrinking Block, and a range of others, my interest here is in making comprehensible Hegel’s theory of time itself. I will argue that according to Hegel’s theory, the past and the future exist as constitutive of the now, and the now is not separable from space, but rather is itself spatial becoming. Stemming from his underlying logic of actuality and becoming, Hegel espouses the view that history (the past) and future possibility are present and constitutive of the“now.” Understanding his theory of time will also help shed some light on a systematic feature found across his philosophy of nature and mind. Additionally, while his theory presents an elegant notion of time within his philosophy, it also offers an intuitive and productive solution for a traditional identity problem of concrete particulars across time and intervenes in contemporary philosophy of time.
11. “Hegel’s End of Art and the Artwork as an Internally Purposive Whole” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 61(3), 2023: 473-498.
Hegel’s end-of-art thesis is arguably the most notorious assertion in aesthetics. I outline traditional interpretive strategies before offering an original alternative to these. I develop a conception of art that facilitates a reading of Hegel on which he is able to embrace three seemingly contradictory theses about art, namely, (i) the end-of-art thesis, (ii) the continued significance of art for its own sake (autonomy thesis), and (iii) the necessity of art for robust knowledge (epistemic-necessity thesis). I argue that Hegel is able to embrace all three theses at once through a conception of the work of art as an internally purposive whole (what I call the “IP View” of art). On the IP View, because of the kind of wholes that artworks are, they (i.a) are valuable for their own sake as ends-in-themselves, (i.b) yield valuable experiences because they are valuable for their own sake, and thereby (i.c) are necessary for robust knowledge. Finally, I suggest that not only does Hegel appear to hold the IP View of art, but also that on such a view, there is a very sensible reason for affirming (one reading of) Hegel’s end-of-art thesis as an important means to establishing art’s actual significance for robust knowledge against soaring, but unsubstantiable, claims about art’s potency with respect to robust knowledge.
12. “Artworks are Valuable for their Own Sake” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 9(2), 2023: 234-252.
To hold that artworks are valuable for their own sake—regardless of whatever secondary value they may have, such as entertainment, formation, education, or a pleasurable experience—is to hold that their final worth is not derived from external or secondary ends. I call this collective set of views the end-in-itself view (or EI view). Nicholas Stang recently leveled a twofold charge of reductio ad absurdum and operating from a double standard against the EI view. In this article, I refute Stang by showing that the charges do not obtain for at least one variation of the EI view that holds artworks to be valuable for their own sake as internally purposive ends-in-themselves (the IP view).
13. “Artworks as Organic Wholes: A Goethean and Hegelian Concept of Art” in Art, Nature, and Self-formation in the Age of Goethe, eds. Gentry, Pirholt, Flodin. de Gruyter, 2024: 85-114
This chapter argues that Goethe and Hegel share a conception of the artwork as an animate or “living” organic whole, whose form is internally organized and exists “in and for itself,” rather than as a mere artifact determined by external purposes or design. As such, the artwork possesses its own kind-normativity and autonomous, authoritative presence, establishing norms for its interpretation and thereby helping explain the distinction between objects that merely function as artifacts and works that present themselves as art.
14. “Goethe’s Theory of Art: Rethinking Organic Wholes and Architecture” in Bloomsbury History of Modern Aesthetics, edited by Colleen Coalter, Bloomsbury, 2023: 1-15.
15. “Pure Synthesis and the Synthetic Unity of Apperception,” Kant-Studien 113(1), 2022: 8-39.
(#1 journal in Kant scholarship) This article argues that Kant’s Principle of the Synthetic Unity of Apperception (PSUA) should not be identified with the “I think” or even with the transcendental unity of apperception, but understood as a purely formal transcendental principle of pure synthesis that grounds the Transcendental Deduction and the objective validity of the categories. On this interpretation, pure synthesis explains how theoretical cognition can possess genuine spontaneity without grounding that spontaneity in a substantial or ‘real’ transcendental subject and thereby lapsing into the kind of dogmatic idealism Kant seeks to avoid.
16. “Hegel’s Logic of Negation,” Negation in Post-Kantian Phil., ed. Moss, Springer, 2022: 397-419.
This chapter challenges the common interpretation that negation is the fundamental “engine” of Hegel’s Science of Logic, arguing that although negation is indispensable to the Logic’s dialectical development, treating the method simply as a triplicity of content, negation, and negation-of-negation mistakes an external formal structure for Hegel’s actual method. It argues instead that negation is ultimately sublated within the absolute idea’s life-like, internal purposive and self-determining activity, so that Hegel’s deepest account of logical intelligibility is not absolute negativity, but an organic form of inner purposiveness in which negation functions as an internal, ongoing component of the movement of becoming.
17. “The Concept of Life in German Idealism and its Aristotelian Roots” Intellectual History Review 31(3), 2021: 379-390.
(Q1 journal) This article argues that the German Idealist’s concept of life (Leben) is deeply rooted in Aristotle’s conception of living beings as internally purposive, self-organizing wholes.
18. “Hegel’s Logic of Purposiveness,” Kantian Legacies in German Idealism. In Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, Routledge, 2021: 36-70.
This chapter argues that Hegel develops Kant’s synthetic a priori principle of purposiveness from the Critique of the Power of Judgment into the underlying logical method of the Science of Logic, through which Hegel establishes two central identities: freedom/necessity and a prior/a posteriori dialectics. The logic of purposiveness thereby functions as Hegel’s transition from critical to absolute idealism as the emergence of an internally self-determining, organic unity of reason, while nevertheless preserving the fundamentally discursive character of human reason inherited from Kant.
19. “Introduction: The Legacies of Kant in German Idealism,” in Kantian Legacies in German Idealism, Routledge, 2021: 1-12.
20. “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.
(this is my most cited piece, though that has mostly to do with the contingency of its being the oldest): this chapter argues that Hegel’s Logic of Life and his conception of the unity of reason are grounded in the free lawfulness of the imagination, developing a Kantian model in which spontaneity and lawfulness, freedom and necessity, are united rather than opposed. Imagination thereby provides a crucial conceptual bridge from Kant to Hegel’s organic conception of reason as self-determining and internally purposive activity, helping explain why the a priori Idea (or logic) of Life occupies a pivotal position in Hegel’s account of reason.
21. “A Priori Equality: Gender and Race,” Journal of the Society for German Idealism and Romanticism: SGIR Review 2, no. 2, 2019: 100-125
This article develops a Kantian-Hegelian account of a priori equality, arguing that the equal worth of persons cannot depend upon contingent, empirical characteristics such as race or gender but must be grounded in the universal conditions of rational agency. It nevertheless modifies a strictly Kantian conception of the a priori through Hegel by showing how this universal normative equality must be actualized within concrete historical and social conditions, allowing an a priori ground of equality to function critically against historically entrenched notions of equality.
22. “Introduction to the Significances of the Imagination in Kant, Idealism, and Romanticism,” in The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism. Ed. Gerad Gentry and Konstantin Pollok. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019: 1-23.
23. “Formal Purposiveness in Kant’s Aesthetic Judgment.” Rethinking Kant, Ed. Pablo Muchnik. Vol. 5. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2018: 253-280.
Peer-Review Journal Special Issue Guest Editor:
24. The Monist, special issue editor: Dialectic Constitutivism: Action, Agency, and the Foundations of Normativity (Oxford Journals, 2028, estimated 100 pages).
25. Hegel Bulletin, special issue editor: Hegelian Constitutivism and Metaethics (Cambridge Journals, 2028, estimated 200 pages).
26-29. SGIR Review, Volume 1-4, 2018-21. 680 pages.
30. Intellectual History Review Volume 31, Issue 3, 2021. 116 pages.
31. Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities (editorial team, Graduate Journal, Yale Law School), 2017-18.
Book Reviews:
32. “Hegel’s Concept of Life by Karen Ng,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2020. 4 pages.
33. “The Normativity of Nature by Hannah Ginsborg.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism: 74.1, 2016: 115-117.