Kant
My core research area is in Kant’s theoretical philosophy, especially when it intersects with epistemology and philosophy of psychology. Current projects include the following papers that are either based on or extend from my dissertation work.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
This paper traces Kant’s theory of space through a critical engagement with Berkeley’s semiotic theory of vision. I argue that Kant transforms Berkeley’s heterogeneity thesis—that sight and touch yield irreducibly distinct contents—into a cornerstone of his own account. Whereas Berkeley reduces imagination to a merely reproductive faculty of association, Kant reconceives it as a productive faculty that integrates heterogenous modalities into a single, unified outer sense.
This paper reconstructs Kant’s theory of time through a critical engagement with Locke’s account of inner sense. I argue that Kant repurposes Locke’s juridical notion of “original acquisition” to describe not the appropriation of external objects but the acquisition of the very forms of intuition. On this reading, acquisition becomes at once a labor of annexation, through which the manifold of intuition is appropriated as “ours”, and a labor of constitution, by which the temporal form itself is produced.
This paper challenges the “preformation” theory of the categories, which holds that the categories are fixed and determinate because they stem from preformed dispositions or “germs” within the mind. Instead, I propose that the categories are acquired through the justified use of our own understanding, in accordance with what I identify as an epistemic principle of cognition. This interpretation illuminates Kant’s anti-nativist stance, clarifies his crucial break from the rationalist tradition, and highlights the crucial role of epistemic agency in human cognition.
This paper addresses the relatively neglected problem of epistemic luck in Kant, arguing that it poses a deeper challenge than moral luck because truth, unlike moral worth, depends on an external success condition beyond the agent’s control. I propose that for Kant, epistemic luck exposes an inevitable gap between the empirical standpoint of contingency and the noumenal standpoint of rational agency. Yet it is precisely in this gap that epistemic responsibility, critique, and self-correction become possible: without epistemic luck, there would be no need for the active exercise of reason or the practice of justification.
History and Philosophy of Psychology
A second, emerging area of my research traces the historical development of theories of learning and education, with a focus on figures such as Locke, Rousseau, and Piaget. This line of work aims to uncover a continuity in how these thinkers conceive the child as a cognitive agent-in-formation and how learning functions as a crucial site of cognitive development. I am currently developing this area along the following themes.
Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke insists that learning must be made pleasant, warning that fear, punishment, or rote drills leads to aversion rather than understanding. I propose that Locke treats pleasure and play as the affective ground of cognition; without them, rational capacities cannot fully develop. On this reading, Locke offers an early theory of intrinsic motivation in cognitive development that anticipates Piaget’s play-based constructivism.
In The Child’s Conception of the World (1929) and The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality (1930), Piaget describes children as initially “egocentric,” unable to distinguish their own perspective from that of others. He argues that decentering—overcoming egocentrism—arises through social interaction and the coordination of perspectives. I propose that this developmental shift sheds light on Kant’s well-known but puzzling distinction in the Prolegomena between judgments of perception, which express merely subjective associations, and judgments of experience, which claim objective validity. On this reading, Piaget provides a developmental analogue to the very process by which cognition moves from perception to experience.
Philosophy of Cognitive Science and AI
A third, emerging area of my research engages with contemporary philosophy of cognitive science and AI, focusing on how insights from Kant and other historical figures can illuminate current debates about cognition, learning, and agency. I am currently developing this area along the following themes.
This paper argues that predictive processing (PP), while a powerful model of the brain as a prediction machine, fails to capture the agential dimension of intrinsically motivated learning. Drawing on Kant’s notion of recognition, I propose that genuine learning requires a form of “second-order recognition,” where agents not only register but endorse the very principles that guide their learning. This Kantian move reframes autonomy as central to cognition and provides resources for extending PP beyond prediction-error minimization to encompass essential forms of human cognition such as creativity, curiosity, and self-actualization.
This paper argues that imagination underwrites rational self-efficacy in fundamentally different ways for humans and artificial agents. Human imagination is not merely stipulative, as in symbolic recombination, but also qualitative, involving phenomenologically rich, first-person projections into possible futures. While artificial systems can approximate the stipulative dimension by recombining features or generating symbolic assignments, they still lack the qualitative capacity to generate the felt sense of coherence and achievability that underwrites distinctively human forms of self-belief.
Philosophy of Law
A further area of my research lies in philosophy of law, where I pursue both traditional and contemporary questions. In the past, I have worked on the intersection of philosophy of criminal law and philosophy of action. I am currently developing new work on AI governance, exploring how the rise of increasingly agentic artificial systems reshapes questions of risk, responsibility, and regulation.
The criminalization of omissions is controversial for several reasons. One concern is that omissions liability appears to violate the act requirement. Another involves the ambiguous causal status of omissions, especially in result crimes. I argue that a distinctive kind of omissions—what I call “refrainings”—are best understood not as mere failures to act but as actions that actively bring about harm. Recognizing refrainings as a distinct category of omission has significant implications for the act requirement and for the justification of criminal liability in so-called “Bad Samaritan” cases.
This paper considers whether the legal concept of intention must be partially broadened to address harms caused by increasingly agentic AI systems. In law, intention typically combines cognitive foresight with a volitional orientation toward a result—whether directly, as purpose, or obliquely, through foresight of virtual certainty. I argue that the law can recognize a functional analogue of intention in artificial systems, rooted in their goal-directed architectures. Recognizing this functional intention could help bridge doctrinal gaps in criminal and tort law while preserving the distinction between genuine autonomous agency and merely functional, machine-based agency.