Annual Rousseau Lecture and Conference of the Standing Group on Kantian Political Thought

Katrin Flikschuh is Professor of Modern Political Theory at the London School of Economics. She works primarily on Kant's practical philosophy, the history of political thought, and modern African Philosophy. She has published widely on Kant, and on the relation between Kant and contemporary liberalism; more recently, she has worked on the relation between Western and African philosphical thinking. Her current principal research project focuses on the idea of ancestral existence in modern African metaphysics.

David James is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His publications include Property and its Forms in Classical German Idealism (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Practical Necessity, Freedom, and History from Hobbes to Marx (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Rousseau and German Idealism: Freedom, Dependence and Necessity (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He is also editor of A Critical Guide to Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and co-editor (with Günter Zöller) of The Cambridge Companion to Fichte (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Luigi Caranti (Ph.D. Boston University) is professor of political philosophy at the Università di Catania, Italy. He worked as visiting researcher in various international institutions including the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University, the Philipps-Universität – Marburg and the Ruhr Universität Bochum. His area of specialism is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

His areas of expertise include the philosophical theory of human rights, democratic peace theory, and contemporary political theory with a special emphasis on distributive justice. Principal investigator of various EU funded research projects, Caranti is currently PI of a Marie Curie RISE fellowship with a network of over fifty scholars based in South America and Europe.

Among his recent publications: The Kantian Federation (CUP 2022) and the edition with Alessandro Pinzani of three volumes rethinking Kant in a contemporary world: Kant and the Problem of Knowledge, Kant and the Problem of Morality and Kant and the Problem of Politics (Routledge 2022).

Stefanie Buchenau is Professor of German History of Ideas at the University of Paris 8 Saint-Denis. Her specialist field is the philosophy of the German Enlightenment, aesthetics and philosophical anthropology.

Stefanie obtained her doctoral thesis (in cotutelle) from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon and Yale University in 2004, followed by a habilitation in philosophy from the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2017.

After having earned an ANR project on Philosophy and Medicine in the modern age between 2009 and 2013 and an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship for experienced researchers from 2014 to 2016, she is currently co-editing the volume on 'Anthropology from the Pragmatic Point of View' in the German reference edition, the Kant Akademieausgabe.

Her recent publications include: The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, The Art of Invention and the Invention of Art (Cambridge: University Press, 2013, paperback 2015), Médecine et philosophie de la nature humaine, de l'Âge classique aux Lumières, co-edited with Raphaële Andrault, Claire Crignon and Anne-Lise Rey (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014), Humankind and Humanity in the Philosophy of the Enlightenment. From Locke to Kant, co-edited with Ansgar Lyssy, (Bloomsbury, 2023), Menschenwürde. Kant und die Aufklärung (due to be published by Felix Meiner in December 2023).

Stefanie Buchenau is currently on a CNRS research leave, for a new book project on philosophy and the geosciences in 18th and 19th Germany.

Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy and Director of the Research Center “Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt. His research focuses on questions of justice, democracy and toleration as well as critical theory and practical reason. In 2012 he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation. He is a Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

He held numerous visiting professorships and fellowships in the US. In 2021, he was a Fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. He is also Visiting Research Professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin.

Important publications: Contexts of Justice (1994/ 2002), Toleration in Conflict (2003/ 2013), The Right to Justification (2007/2012), Justification and Critique (2011/2013), Normativity and Power (2015/2017), Die noumenale Republik (2021, engl. forthcoming with Polity Press).

Alasia Nuti is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of York. Her first book entitled Injustice and the Reproduction of History (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which examines why the unjust past matters from a normative perspective. The book was awarded an Honorable Mention from the ECPR Prize in Political Theory in 2021. In 2022, Alasia was awarded the Early Career Prize from the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought for excellence in research and teaching.

Alasia is currently working on a co-authored book with Gabriele Badano on political liberalism and the containment of illiberal and anti-democratic views, which is under contract with Oxford University Press. She is also embarking on a new project on the uses (and abuses) of the unjust past in activist politics. 

David Owen is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He has published widely on post-Kantian philosophy and on issues in the ethics of migration. His books include Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (2007), What do we owe to refugees? (2020) and Displacement, Human Rights, and Sexual and Reproductive Health (2023, with Pia Riggirozzi & Natalia Cintra).

Sorin Baiasu is Professor of Philosophy at Keele University and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Oxford University. He is founder and director of the Keele-Oxford-St Andrew Kantian (KOSAK) Research Centre and Chair of the Steering Committee of the Kantian Standing Group of the European Consortium for Political Research. His research focuses mainly on topics in metaphysics, ethics and political philosophy.

He published Kant and Sartre: Re-discovering Critical Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and edited or co-edited Politics and Metaphysics in Kant (with H. Williams and S. Pihlström, University of Wales Press 2011), Kant on Practical Justification: Interpretive Essays (with M. Timmons, OUP 2013), Comparing Kant and Sartre (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Sincerity in Politics and International Relations (with S. Loriaux, Routledge 2017), Kant and the Continental Tradition: Sensibility, Nature and Religion (with A. Vanzo, Routledge 2020) and The Kantian Mind (with M. Timmons, Routledge 2023).

His projects have been financially supported, among others, by the British Academy, the European Commission and the European Research Council.

Jörg Schaub is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the School of Philosophical, Historical, and Interdisciplinary Studies (PHAIS) at the University of Essex. His research focusses on critical theory, aesthetics, post-Kantian Philosophy (esp. Hegel), as well as social and political philosophy (esp. Honneth and Rawls).

Norman Ajari is a Lecturer in Francophone Black Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Dignity or Death: Ethics and politics of race (Polity, 2023) and Darkening Blackness: Race, gender, class, and pessimism in 21st century Black thought (Polity, 2024).

Tereza Čeladníková is a graduate student of political science at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science and public policy. Tereza is mainly interested in municipal politics and submunicipal democracy in the Czech Republic.

Tereza has been involved in student activities since the beginning of her studies. She was the vice president of the Political Science Club, the student association of the Institute of Political Studies. She currently serves as the Student Ambassador for the Faculty of Social Sciences and helps with the integration of new students into life at the faculty. She has also been involved in teaching practical seminars and has participated in several research projects.