Kenny Walden
Associate Professor
Appointments
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Area of Expertise
Ethics,
Moral psychology,
Aesthetics,
Kant
Biography
I work on ethics, aesthetics, and agency. At the moment I am interested in various combinations of those issues: the ways that our aesthetic powers contribute to human agency, the role of creativity in moral thought, what is demanded by the special value of humanity, and the ways that social and historical conditions shape the normative landscape.
Education
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
A.B. Harvard College
Publications
"Clarissa Dalloway and the Tragedy of Appreciation", European Journal of Philosophy.
"Creativity as a higher agency", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 110 (3), 2025.
"Almost every work of art is a failure", Philosophical Topics, 52 (1), 2024.
"The poets of our lives", Journal of Philosophy 121(5), 2024.
"Legislating taste", Philosophical Quarterly 73(4), 2023.
"Agency and aesthetic identity", Philosophical Studies 180(12), 2023.
"Reason and respect", Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 15, 2020.
"Incomparable numbers", Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, vol. 10, 2020.
"Reason unbound", European Journal of Philosophy 27(3), 2019.
"Practical reason not as such", Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 13(2), 2018.
"Morality, agency, and other people", Ergo, 5(3), 2018.
"Art and moral revolution", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73(3), 2015.
"The Euthyphro Dilemma", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90(3), 2015.
"The aid that leaves something to chance", Ethics 124(2), 2014.
"In defense of reflective equilibrium", Philosophical Studies 166(2), 2013.
"Laws of Nature, Laws of Freedom, and the Social Construction of Normativity", Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 7, 2012.
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