Richard Velkley

Richard L. Velkley
Born	(1949-03-17) March 17, 1949
Education	Pennsylvania State University (Ph.D.) Cornell University (B.A.)
Awards	NEH Fellowship Earhart Foundation Fellowship Bradley Foundation Fellowship ACLS Fellowship
Era	21st-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental
Institutions	Tulane University
Thesis	Kant as Philosopher of Theodicy (1978)
Doctoral advisor	Thomas Seebohm
Doctoral students	Gregory R. Johnson
Main interests	political philosophy, post-Kantian philosophy
Website	liberalarts.tulane.edu/departments/philosophy/people/richard-velkley

Richard L. Velkley (born March 17, 1949) is an American philosopher and Celia Scott Weatherhead Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University. Velkley is known for his expertise on Kant, Rousseau, and post-Kantian philosophy. He is a former associate editor of The Review of Metaphysics (1997-2006) and a former president of the Metaphysical Society of America (2017-18).

Philosophy

Velkley's writing treats questions about the status of philosophic reason and its relation to society and politics since the late 18th century: the principles of Enlightenment thought and their revision, criticism and sometimes complete rejection; conceptions of freedom and their role in attempts to address social and psychic division and alienation; the turn to aesthetic experience and aesthetic education; criticisms of modernity inspired by ancient thought; the meaning and the consequences of the historical turn in modern philosophy; accounts of crisis in the philosophical tradition and critical analyses of the grounds of the tradition. He conceives the study of the history of philosophy as a way to become aware of persisting perplexities in human life that remain unresolved in the modern period. His historical inquiry starts from Rousseau's criticism of modern philosophy and considers responses of later thinkers to it, in the first place Kant. He has lectured widely in the U.S. and abroad (Canada, France, Germany, China, Belgium, Brazil, Italy, Denmark) on these topics.

Books

• Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundation of Kant's Critical Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1989, reprint 2014).
• Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in Question (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
• Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (University of Chicago Press, 2011, reprint 2014; Chinese translation, 2016; French translation, 2017).
• Leo Strauss on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (ed.) (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
• The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant's Philosophy by Dieter Henrich (ed.) (Harvard University Press, 1994).
• Freedom and the Human Person (ed.), Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, vol. 48 (Catholic University of America Press, 2007).
• Kant's 'Observations' and 'Remarks': A Critical Guide, edited by Susan Shell and Richard Velkley (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• The Linguistic Dimension of Kant's Thought: Historical and Critical Essays, edited by Frank Schalow and Richard Velkley (Northwestern University Press, 2014).

External links

• Richard Velkley at Tulane University
• Richard Velkley on Rousseau on YouTube
• "The Tyranny of Beauty: On Art and Truth in Lessing's Laocoon" by Richard Velkley on YouTube
• "Political Philosophy and the Ontological Question" by Richard Velkley on YouTube