Philosophy Department Faculty

Karin Nisenbaum joined the faculty at Boston College in 2020.  She previously taught at Colgate University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Denver University, and Colorado College.  Her research focuses on topics in metaphysics and practical reason in Kant’s critical philosophy, as interpreted and developed by post-Kantian thinkers such as Fichte and Schelling and by Jewish philosophers such as Maimon and Rosenzweig.

Her book, For the Love of Metaphysics: Nihilism and the Conflict of Reason from Kant to Rosenzweig, was published with Oxford University Press in 2018.  Currently she is working on three projects that build on her book’s central ideas.  One is a manuscript that draws on Kant’s practical philosophy and the philosophy of nature derived from German Idealism and German Romanticism in order to address problems confronting neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism.  The second is a series of articles that turn to German Idealism, Phenomenology, and Existentialism to offer different responses to recent Anglophone objections to the method of transcendental argumentation.  The third examines Kant’s conception of the highest good in light of Schelling’s interpretation, and draws on the contemporary literature on knowledge as the exercise of a rational capacity to defend the view that moral action is the actualization of our capacity to will, and in that way know, the good.