Julian Wuerth

Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy

Research

Wuerth works primarily on Kant's philosophy but also in the history of ethics, contemporary ethics, and early modern philosophy. 

The Cambridge Kant Lexicon (Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 803), edited by Wuerth, contains detailed and original entries by 130 leading Kant scholars, covering Kant’s most important concepts as well as each of his writings.  Part I covers Kant’s notoriously difficult philosophical concepts, providing entries on these individual “trees” of Kant’s philosophical system.  Part II, by contrast, provides an overview of the “forest” of Kant’s philosophy, with entries on each of his published works and on each of his sets of lectures and personal reflections.  This part is arranged chronologically, revealing not only the broad sweep of Kant’s thought but also its development over time.  Wuerth is the author of multiple entries in the volume.

Wuerth’s book, Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2014, pp.349), is the winner of the 2015 North American Kant Society Senior Scholar Book Prize.  Considering a broad range of sources spanning all periods of Kant’s recorded thought, the book first traces the interrelated evolutions of Kant’s epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind.  The result is a new interpretation of Kant’s philosophy of mind across his philosophical corpus – including his famous “Paralogisms” chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason – that rejects influential functionalist interpretations.  The book next presents an overview of Kant’s notoriously cryptic account of the mind’s mental powers.  This overview of the mind’s powers provides key new findings regarding Kant’s theory of action, which structures Kant’s ethics.  Applying these findings to Kant’s ethics, the book next defends a moral realist reading of Kant’s ethics against dominant constructivist readings, which are shown to offer intellectualized versions of Kant’s moral subject.  For Kant, sensible inclinations are not necessarily confused, much less incoherent grounds for action, simply because they conflict with moral obligations, as constructivists allege.  Instead, Kant identifies inclinations as their own, irreducible conative currency, distinct in kind from our moral conative currency.  For Kant, happiness is one thing, morality another, and the two need not align in this life.  If we aim to live morally, we must accordingly recognize, not deny, this inconvenient truth, cultivating cognitive, emotional, and desiderative aspects of ourselves in ways familiar to those working within the virtue ethics tradition. 

Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 308), edited by Julian Wuerth and Lawrence Jost, includes essays by Marcia Baron, Talbot Brewer, Timothy Chappell, Lara Denis, Paul Guyer, Barbara Herman, Rosalind Hursthouse, Nancy Sherman, Michael Slote, Michael Stocker, Christine Swanton, Allen Wood, and Julian Wuerth.  These essays explore the evolving and increasingly fruitful debate between two leading approaches to ethics: Kantian ethics and virtue ethics.

Wuerth is currently working on What Should I Do?: Kant’s Ethics (Routledge Press, under contract). This is one book in a five book/five author series, published by Routledge, on the five central questions that Kant addresses in his philosophy.  This book addresses the question of ethics, “What should I do?,” as answered by Kant, while the remaining books address the questions “What can I know?” (Michelle Grier), “What may I hope for?” (Andrew Chignell), “What is a human?” (Patrick Frierson), and “What is Enlightenment?” (Samuel Fleischacker).