Paul Katsafanas

Assistant Professor Department of Philosophy University of New Mexico Email: katsafan at unm edu Curriculum Vitae
I work in the areas of nineteenth-century philosophy and ethics. My work centers on topics at the interface between ethics and philosophy of mind, including the way in which normative claims might be justified; the nature of self-consciousness; the nature of agency; the notion of drive; and the concepts of free agency and unified agency. The two questions upon which I am currently focusing are: - Is it possible to derive normative conclusions from facts about the nature of reflective agency? - How should we understand the notion of reflective agency? In particular, how do non-conscious aspects of our mental economies complicate traditional models of reflective agency? I address these questions in part by mining the work of certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers. I draw especially on the work of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, arguing that by appropriating and developing aspects of their accounts, we can produce an answer to the above questions. As these remarks may indicate, I treat the history of philosophy not merely as a subject of antiquarian interest, but as a wellspring of ideas containing the resources to shape debates currently at the forefront of our field.	research
	Publications Dissertation
	current projects
	Autonomy, Power, and the Foundations of Ethics I am currently writing a book on constitutivism, which is the view that we can derive normative claims from facts about action's constitutive features. I argue that although the current versions of constitutivism encounter insuperable problems, we can overcome these problems by appropriating and developing ideas from Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. In particular, by drawing on the rich accounts of philosophical psychology and agency developed by these philosophers, we can show both how normative claims can be justified, and how the notion of normative authority should be understood. The account I develop explains normative authority in terms of inescapability, and justifies normative claims by showing them to be standards to which we are inescapably committed in virtue of facts about the constitutive features of human agency.