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Rachel Zuckert

Associate Professor
E-mail: r-zuckert@northwestern.edu

My research focuses on Kant and his philosophical context, broadly understood:  both his eighteenth-century predecessors and contemporaries, and post-Kantian, nineteenth-century philosophy.  I am interested in practically every aspect of Kant’s philosophy, but so far my research has primarily concerned Kant’s Critique of Judgment, including work on Kant’s aesthetics and his conceptions of subjectivity and of affective sensibility more generally; on questions concerning the possibility of empirical knowledge on the Kantian view; and on Kant’s philosophy of biology and (more broadly) the meaning, role, or status of “purpose” or teleology in Kant’s system – as well as on related topics in late modern philosophy, particularly in the history of aesthetics.  My current research projects include a book project on Johann Gottfried Herder’s aesthetic theory and work on eighteenth-century theories of the sublime, as well as on various topics in Kantian political philosophy, philosophy of religion and philosophy of history. 

I have offered upper level undergraduate courses on Kant, nineteenth-century philosophy, philosophy of the Enlightenment, aesthetics, and feminist philosophy, and graduate seminars on Kant, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics, and Kierkegaard.  Additional topics for future courses and seminars might include evil, the philosophy of history, the works of other figures in modern philosophy (Locke, Hume, Rousseau), or neo-Kantianism.

CURRENT CV

 

Work

• “Sculpture and Touch: Herder’s Aesthetics of Sculpture” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67:3 Summer 2009, 285-299.

• “Purposiveness and Projection:  Kant and Heidegger on the Temporality of Judgment,” in Transcendental Heidegger, Steven Crowell and Jeffrey Malpas, eds. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007), 251-231.

• “Kant’s Rationalist Aesthetics,” Kant-Studien 98 4 2007, 443-463.

• Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

• "A New Look at Kant's Theory of Pleasure" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60:3 Summer 2002.
• "MacKinnon's Critique of Objectivity," in A Mind of One's Own (second edition), Louise Anthony and Charlotte Witt, eds. (Boulder , CO : Westview Press, 2002).
• "Awe or Envy: Herder Contra Kant on the Sublime" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61:3 Summer 2003.
• "The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Formalism," Journal of the History of Philosophy , October 2006.

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