Dr. Stephen Howard – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Stephen Howard

KU Leuven
Philosophy

External Senior Fellow
October 2024 – July 2025

Last Update: 08.11.2024

Curriculum Vitae

Stephen Howard holds a PhD in philosophy from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London, and has held successive postdoctoral fellowships at KU Leuven (2018-2024), awarded by the Research Foundation – Flanders. He has been a visiting scholar at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the University of Notre Dame, and the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest, and he is a lecturer in philosophy at the P.A.R.T.S. contemporary dance school in Brussels. His research interests include Kant’s philosophy, the concepts of force and power, and early modern natural philosophy and metaphysics (including Leibniz and French and German Enlightenment thinkers). He has edited a collection of Howard Caygill’s essays and he is co-editor, with Jack Stetter, of the forthcoming Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy, Edinburgh University Press.

Selected Publications

Kant’s Late Philosophy of Nature: The Opus postumum. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
“The Cosmological Ideas in Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Their Unique Status and Twofold Regulative Use”. Southern Journal of Philosophy 62.3 (2024): 277-293.
“D’Alembert’s Cosmological View of the Sciences and its Legacy in Kant”. Perspectives on Science 32.5 (2024): 670-700.
“Kant on Limits, Boundaries, and the Positive Function of Ideas”. European Journal of Philosophy 30 (2022): 64–78.
“Kant on the Fundamental Forces of Matter: Why Attraction and Repulsion?” Kantian Review 26 (2021): 413-433.

FRIAS Project

A Kantian Epistemic Approach to Climate Change Debates

Anthropogenic climate change is often designated a ‘wicked problem’, due to its immense complexity, diverging stakeholder interests, and uncertain outcomes. Such difficulties can lead to confusion, resignation, or even scepticism. This project contends that Kant’s philosophy contains valuable, hitherto overlooked resources for addressing this epistemic side of the contemporary crisis. Kant’s diagnosis of the difficulties that emerge in cosmology when attempting to think the world as a totality can be fruitfully applied to climate change debates, the project argues, and so can the Kantian solution, which consists in sharply distinguishing between theoretical and practical issues and the grounds of justification in each sphere.