Faculty

Jennifer Mensch

Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Science, Technology and Society
Assistant Director, Rock Ethics Institute

Education:
  • B.A., George Mason University
  • M.A., The University of Memphis
  • Ph.D., Emory University
Areas of Specialization:
  • 17th- and 18th-century Metaphysics and Epistemology
  • Kant
  • History and Philosophy of Science
  • Theoretical and Applied Ethics
Recent Courses:
  • Modern Philosophy
  • Theories of Knowledge
  • Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
  • Theories of Perception Ethics
Recent Publications:
  • “‘The Key to All Metaphysics’: Kant’s Letter to Herz, 1772” Kantian Review Vol. 13, Fall 2007.
  • Review of Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays by Paul Guyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, http://ndpr.nd.edu, Summer, 2006.
  • “Kant and the Problem of Idealism: On the Significance of the Göttingen Review,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer 2006.
  • “Morality and Politics in Kant’s Philosophy of History” in Toward Greater Human Solidarity: Options for a Plural World, ed. Anindita Balslev (Kolkata: Dasgupta & Co, PVT. Ltd, 2005).
  • “Between Sense and Thought: Synthesis in Kant’s Deductions,” Epoché. A Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 10, No. 1, Fall 2005.
  • “Kant on Truth,” Idealistic Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, Fall 2004.
  Current Projects:

  • I am currently at work on three articles:  “Mathematics and Intuition in Descartes and Kant,” “Descartes Reads Groundwork III:  On Freedom of the Will in Descartes and Kant,” and “What Locke Saw.  Double Affection in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding.”  And I continue my work on a monograph:  Intellectual Intuition:  Transforming the Imperative of Knowing from Descartes and Kant to Schelling.  This project takes intellectual intuition as a complicated but guiding thread in tracing both the development and demise of the modern epistemic project.  The work starts out with an account of Descartes’ embrace of Augustine’s “divine illumination” in order to set the stage for what finally must be accomplished if the search for certainty is to survive:  Kant’s turn towards an empiricist, mitigated skepticism in his rejection of anything like intellectual intuition.  The German Idealists’ subsequent rehabilitation of intellectual intuition heralds more than dissatisfaction with Modernity, it marks the development of a new episteme altogether.

 

Faculty