Stephen Cunniff

My research focuses on German Idealism, especially Kant and Hegel. My dissertation is on Hegel’s account of the relation between self-consciousness, freedom, and human sociality in the famous fourth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Standard interpretations of that account take Hegel to combine broadly Kantian notions of freedom and self-consciousness with a conception of rationality and conceptual norms as socially constituted. Against this approach, I argue that Hegel’s departure from Kant is far more fundamental and centers on a novel appropriation of Aristotle’s concepts of internal purposiveness, autarkeia, and the shared life of a community. My broader research focuses on the themes of agency, self-knowledge, and social-political life, both in the history of philosophy and in contemporary thought.