Full Agenda for Trustee Scholar
Burt Louden, professor of philosophy, has been named USM's
third Trustee Scholar. An expert on German philosophers and
especially Kant, Louden will use his year-long appointment
to advance four projects that are outgrowths of his most recent
book, "Kant's Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to
Human Beings," published by Oxford University Press in
2000. That was the first book to analyze Kant's work on empirical
ethics, which seeks to apply ethics to human situations.
Reviews of "Kant's Impure Ethics" led to invitations
for Louden to serve as translator and co-editor of two volumes
on Kant's lectures on anthropology, originally delivered between
1772 and 1796 at the University of Königsberg, which
will be published as part of the Cambridge (University) Edition
of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Besides these two projects,
Louden plans during his tenure as Trustee Scholar to edit
the first English translation of Friedrich Schleiermacher's
"Lectures on Philosophical Ethics," also for a Cambridge
Press series. In addition, he has another book of his own
he wants to get underway, recasting arguments from Enlightenment
philosophers for a moral world into a present context, which
he's titling, "The World We Want: A Defense of the Moral
Ideals of the Enlightenment."
At present, Louden, observes, he's "suffering from an
embarrassment of scholarly riches." But he believes that
the projects are intertwined and reinforce each other.
Louden's research for "Kant's Impure Ethics" was
supported by an NEH Fellowship, a USM sabbatical, and an Alexander
von Humboldt Research Fellowship that enabled him to spend
two years researching Kant in Germany. He also translated
Kant's "On Education" from the German for a Cambridge
University series on Kant. In addition to Kant, Louden has
written numerous journal articles on ethical theory. He is
the author of a previous book, "Morality and Moral Theory:
A Reappraisal and Reaffirmation" (1992), also published
by Oxford University Press, and co-editor of an anthology,
"The Greeks and Us," published by The University
of Chicago Press.
The scholarship supports release time from teaching. Previous
Trustee Scholars at USM were biologist Tom Knight and medievalist
Kathy Ashley.
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