Guus Duindam
About Me
I am a researcher at the University of Michigan working in normative and applied ethics, the philosophy of law, and Kant. I am currently working on several papers defending and interpreting Kant's Formula of Universal Law.
I am also a graduate of Michigan Law and currently work as a judicial law clerk at the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
In my dissertation, "An Interpretation and Defense of the Supreme Principle of Morality," I aimed to defend Kant's Formula of Universal Law against the modern consensus that it is rigid and wholly unworkable. By connecting the disparate anglophone and Continental European interpretive literatures, paying closer heed to Kant's historical context, and returning to Kant's German primary text, I provide a new interpretation of the Kantian ethical system. In so doing, I hope to show that Kant's Categorical Imperative can be the source of a normatively plausible ethics.
My doctoral advisers were Sarah Buss, Janum Sethi, Allen Wood, Robert Johnson and Nico Cornell.
My other philosophical projects include papers about retributivism, transcendental idealism, and the phenomenal unity of consciousness.