In April, we shared the devastating news of Karl Ameriks' passing. Today we want to honor his memory with a memorial written by Eric Watkins that celebrates Karl's extraordinary contributions to Kant scholarship and community over his distinguished career.

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I am deeply saddened to announce that Karl Ameriks passed away in Mishawaka, Indiana on Monday April 28, 2025, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a week earlier.

Karl was born on November 5, 1947 in Munich, Germany and immigrated with his family to the United States shortly thereafter. After growing up in the Midwest, he attended Yale University, where he received both his bachelor (1969) and doctoral (1973) degrees. On December 26, 1970, he was married to Geraldine Anne Benjamin, who survives him, along with one brother, John, and two sons, Michael and Kevin, and their families. In 1973, Karl joined the Department of Philosophy at Notre Dame, where he remained until his retirement in 2016, though as professor emeritus he was as active as ever.

Karl’s scholarship was extensive, deep, and extraordinarily influential, consisting of seven monographs and over 150 articles, commentaries, critical interventions, and book reviews. His first book, Kant’s Theory of Mind, published by Clarendon Press in 1982 (with an expanded edition in 2001), presented a highly detailed contextual and philosophical analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, which remains indispensable reading for anyone interested in understanding the Paralogisms. In 2000, he published Kant and the Fate of Autonomy with Cambridge University Press, an incisive defense of Kant against Reinhold’s, Fichte’s, and Hegel’s attempted appropriations of Kant’s philosophy. Interpreting Kant’s Critiques, published in 2003, collected together a number of classic papers that Karl had written on each of Kant’s three Critiques, including “Kant’s Transcendental Deduction as a Regressive Argument”, “Kantian Idealism Today”, and “Kant’s Deduction of Freedom and Morality”. Kant and the Historical Turn, published in 2006, is an extended study of Reinhold’s philosophy and how in attempting to secure the foundation of Kant’s philosophy, Reinhold radically changed philosophy and how it was practiced thereafter. Kant’s Elliptical Path, published in 2012, argues for an overarching interpretation of Kant that emphasizes historical, moral, and religious themes, while drawing contrasts with a wide range of important 19th and 20th century thinkers such as Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel, Nietzsche, MacIntyre, Cavell, Taylor, and Frank. In 2019, Karl published Kantian Subjects, which focuses on Kant’s highly complex conception of self-determination and its positive connections to (but also differences with) post-Kantian philosophical viewpoints. His final monograph, Kantian Dignity and its Difficulties, published last year by Oxford University Press, presents an extended discussion of Kant’s conception of duty and of how elements of it have survived both in philosophy and in the wider intellectual world, with an intriguing emphasis on Thomas Mann and his conversion to democracy. In addition, Karl’s publications include a number of important edited volumes (e.g., The Modern Subject and The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism) as well as several influential translations (especially Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics).

Though Karl was never one to draw attention to himself, he was an extraordinary leader in the profession. In the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, he served as Director of Graduate Studies (1981-4) and as Acting Chair (1988-9). He was the chair (or co-chair) of over two dozen PhD students. In 1999, he was named McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy. He organized a number of highly influential conferences, including one on Kant (featuring Onora O’Neill) and one on German Idealism (featuring Manfred Frank). He served as one of two general editors of Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy Series (with approximately 70 volumes) and was a co-founding editor of the Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus. He was a Fulbright Fellow as well as a Fellow at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study, and he received multiple fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He was elected President of the Central Division American Philosophical Association (2004-5) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. Karl was an especially important member of NAKS from its earliest days, serving as its President (acting 1990-1, 1991-4), and as General Editor of the NAKS Studies in Philosophy publication series. He served as a highly valued member of NAKS’ Board of Trustees for almost four decades (1994-2022).

Karl’s legacy in the profession is immense. In his publications he advanced uncountably many influential interpretive theses by offering a “moderate” view of Transcendental Idealism, interpreting the Transcendental Deduction as a “regressive argument”, diagnosing a “great reversal” in Kant’s position on freedom, identifying and revealing the inadequacies of various “short arguments” to idealism, interpreting Kant as proposing a “modest system” of philosophy, advancing the importance of “elliptical paths”, and so on. Methodologically, he combined extraordinarily subtle interpretations of Kant’s texts with rich philosophical insights, based an outstanding grasp of Kant’s immediate historical context. He was instrumental in forging much closer connections between the North American and European (especially German) philosophical communities. His extraordinary mentoring of students helped them realize their full potential and achieve professional success, and through his invariably incisive and constructive comments, he helped scholars both young and old.

As those who interacted with him will attest, Karl was not only a consummate scholar, but a truly exceptional person. He was both brilliant and wise, incredibly generous with his time and insights (e.g., offering perceptive comments at talks and highly detailed feedback on drafts of papers), fundamentally optimistic (while mindful of humanity’s darker impulses), full of unexpected references and anecdotes, and, to top it all off, hilariously funny. He will be sorely missed by all those who have benefitted from the immeasurable contributions he made to the community of Kant scholars who are the North American Kant Society.

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NAKS thanks Eric Watkins for writing this memorial

We are very pleased to announce that Kantian Review, which has been funding the NAKS Wilfrid Sellars Junior Scholar’s Prize for some time now, has significantly expanded its support of NAKS.  Kantian Review will now also fund the Henry Allison Senior Scholar Prize in the amount of $300.

In addition, Kantian Review will fund three additional graduate student travel stipends for travel to Kant conferences, with priority given to graduate students travelling to NAKS meetings or meetings of the UK Kant Society, and among those, priority given to those presenting a paper, commenting. If there are less than three applicants meeting these conditions, graduate students who wish to attend a conference will also be considered.  Applicants must be NAKS members in good standing. See https://northamericankantsociety.org/Graduate-Student-Travel-Stipends for more information.

We heartily thank  Kantian Review for their continuing and increased support of the North American Kant Society!

This notice mourns the passing of the prominent philosopher Michael L. Friedman, who died at Stanford Hospital on March 24, 2025 after a long illness. He was 77. Friedman was the Suppes Professor of Philosophy of Science at Stanford University until his retirement in 2024.   

Friedman (Ph.D. Princeton, 1973) had been a member of the Stanford Philosophy Department since 2000. He taught previously at Harvard (1972-75), the University of Pennsylvania (1975-82), the University of Illinois at Chicago (1982-94), and Indiana University (1994-2000), where he served as Chair of History and Philosophy of Science. He also held visiting positions at Harvard, UC Berkeley, Western Ontario, Konstanz, Oxford, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He was made Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, and was President of the Philosophy of Science Association in 2000. He was awarded the 1987 Lakatos Prize (for Foundations of Space-Time Theories), the 1985 Matchette Prize (for the same work), and the 2015 Fernando Gil International Prize in Philosophy of Science (for Kant’s Construction of Nature).

Michael Friedman was among the most incisive philosophical intelligences of our era, and his work left an indelible mark on the philosophy of science, on Kant studies, and on philosophy more broadly. His early work on space-time theories and on unification-based theories of scientific explanation was broadly influential. Noteworthy highlights include the Lakatos prize-winning Foundations of Space-Time Theories (1983) and the widely cited paper “Explanation and Scientific Understanding” (J Phil, 1974). Over time, his interests and his contributions steadily moved in the direction of greater historical depth. “Kant’s Theory of Geometry” (Phil Rev, 1985) initiated Friedman’s field-shaping intervention into Kant scholarship, and sparked a series of penetrating studies that found an early culmination in the landmark book Kant and the Exact Sciences (1992), which decisively reoriented Kant studies by restoring the systematic Kantian account of the foundations of exact scientific knowledge to its rightful central place in our understanding of the overall Kantian philosophy.

That project kicked off three decades of probing scholarship on Kant and Newton, which included a new translation of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (2004) and literally dozens of influential papers. The culmination of this historical work was Friedman’s monumentally detailed, Gil-prize-winning Kant’s Construction of Nature (2013), which probes the deepest and most technical details of Kant’s reconstruction of Newtonian science.

Through this research trajectory, Friedman remade himself into a scholarly historian of philosophy and science, with sensitivity to the historical actors’ own categories and the full strangeness of the past. But he never relinquished the aim of also deploying that historical depth in the service of his own novel explanations of scientific knowledge. Indeed, his historical work fed directly into his distinctive, neo-Kantian theory of the progress of science, which combined Kuhnian insights into the nature of revolutionary scientific change with Kantian ones about how a priori constitutive principles permit the formulation of well-framed scientific questions that can stand in exact relation to evidence. These ideas received initial expression in Dynamics of Reason (2001), work which began life as the 1999 Kant Lectures at Stanford. The ideas continued to preoccupy Friedman, and a fuller and more detailed working out of the Friedman neo-Kantian conception of science was the subject of his 2012 Spinoza Lectures and his 2015 Isaiah Berlin Lectures at Oxford, as well as late papers and manuscripts on which he continued working until his health gave out.

Friedman was also one of our major scholarly interpreters of the development of analytic philosophy and its connections to philosophy of science, with particular expertise on Carnap and logical positivism (Reconsidering Logical Positivism, 1999). In addition, he was a leading voice on the emergence of the split between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy. A Parting of the Ways (2000) shed decisive light on the previously under- or even unappreciated role played in that split by differing reactions to certain difficulties that arose in the research program of orthodox neo-Kantianism generally, and within Ernst Cassirer’s work, in particular.

Friedman’s major lecture series on the material about Cassirer, Carnap, and Heidegger, like the ones on the Dynamics of Reason material, were experiences of impressive rigor, remarkable erudition, and unforgettable intellectual excitement for those who were able to attend.

Friedman’s training touched literally dozens of students and postdocs, decisively shaping the intellectual trajectories of an exceptional group of younger scholars across the history of philosophy, the history and philosophy of the exact sciences, and contemporary philosophy of science alike. Many others of us who were never his students likewise benefitted as colleagues from his penetrating pressure and critique, and from studying his careful work. Readers can gain a sense of the depth and power of these intellectual connections from the remarkable 850 pp. volume Discourse on a New Method (2010), which brought together an impressive collection of students and colleagues to engage with themes from Friedman’s work. His own response to the contributors runs to over 200 pp., and should be considered another Friedman book in its own right.

Michael was preceded in death by his beloved wife and philosophical collaborator, Graciela de Pierris (1950-2024). He is survived by his mother, his sister, her two children, and his three grand nieces, as well as a wide circle of students, colleagues, and admirers worldwide.

Michael was a philosopher’s philosopher. He was immensely serious about our subject, and he was relentlessly demanding—both in the excellence he expected from his interlocutors (and himself), and in his recognition that knowledge and philosophical understanding are a never ending journey demanding continual improvement. As Kant rightly saw, the sort of systematic knowledge to which philosophy aspires is a regulative ideal, not an achieved fact. When one talked with Michael, philosophy was never far from the surface, whatever the ostensible topic.

His death is an enormous loss for the world of philosophy.

[NAKS thanks Lanier Anderson for sharing this memorial]

The North American Kant Society is pleased to announce the results of our recent Board elections. Congratulations to our newly elected members:

• Béatrice Longuenesse (term until 2034)
• Andrew Chignell (term until 2034)
• Andrews Reath (term until 2028, completing Jane Kneller's term)

We thank all candidates for their willingness to serve, and we extend our gratitude to our outgoing board members for their dedicated service.

It is with sadness that we mark the passing of Robert Paul Wolff on January 6 of this year in Durham, North Carolina.  Professor Wolff is best known in the Kant world for two influential books, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity (1963) and The Autonomy of Reason (1974).  He also wrote a great deal on political philosophy from a Marxist perspective, critiquing political liberalism in The Poverty of Liberalism (1968), arguing in favor of anarchism in In Defense of Anarchism (1969), taking particular aim at Rawl’s Theory of Justice in his Understanding Rawls (1977), and commenting on the works of Karl Marx in  Marx: A Reconstruction and Critique of Capital  (1984) and Moneybags Must Be So Lucky: On the Structure of Capitol (1988). 

Professor Wolff also wrote a book arguing for the self-governance of universities and, quite presciently, against the marketization and external interference of universities in The Ideal of the University (1969).  In a reflection of his deep political convictions, Professor Wolff left the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Philosophy Department for that universities Department of Afro-American Studies, and wrote about it in Autobiography of an Ex-White Man: Learning a New Master Narrative for America (2005).    He also founded USSAS, University Scholarships for South African Students, in 1990, which has helped more than 1,200 disadvantaged students in South Africa receive higher education in that country. 

Professor Wolff earned his BA, MA and PhD in Philosophy at Harvard and taught at Harvard from 1958-1961. He was then Assistant Professor  at the University of Chicago 1961-1964, Associate Professor at Columbia University 1964-1971, Professor in the Philosophy Department at UM-Amherst 1971-1992, the Department of Afro-American Studies there in 1992-2008, and then Professor Emeritus.

More information can be found at the following links:

https://professorsemeritus.columbia.edu/people/robert-p-wolff-1933-2025

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/legacyremembers/robert-wolff-obituary?id=57223118

Profs. Pat Kitcher and Günter Zöller have finished their 10-year terms as members of the NAKS Board of Trustees, and Prof. Jane Kneller is also stepping down from the NAKS Board of Trustees. We would like to thank all three of them for all their work supporting NAKS for this last decade - reviewing papers and books for prizes, serving on program committees, and advising the Executive Committee on all manner of issues. Without their hard work and the work of the other members of the Board of Trustees, NAKS would not be able to function. Thank you, Prof. Kitcher, Prof. Zöller, and Prof. Jane Kneller!

We are now calling for nominations - including self-nominations - to stand for election to fill these three positions on the Board of Trustees. If you would like to nominate someone, perhaps yourself, please fill out the folllowing Google form:  https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdM418YHYotmehSBcuw5UkI9BVcYcqBAHx8S3SNkcrRYcAAow/viewform?usp=sharing

Deadline for nominations: February 15

De Gruyter Brill and NAKS both look back with pride on many years of efforts to honor and preserve Kant’s legacy. As a scholarly publisher with a wide range of titles dealing with Kant’s work and Kantian philosophy, De Gruyter Brill is offering now a 40 percent discount on all of their publications to NAKS members. – visit the link below to explore the full catalog and access your member discount.

https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/NAKS

We are getting closer to our goal of $10,000 for the Cheerful Philanthropist Fund Drive!  

There are only four days left! This is not an annual fund drive (we promise!), but a special effort to supplement the generous donation of the Henry Allison family. We are at $8,200 and need just $1,800 more to reach our goal, but we have a generous matching fund to encourage and measure the commitment of our members that will double your donation, so practically speaking, we only need $900 more to reach our goal. (Of course, it would be great to exceed our goal). Any size donation will be much appreciated!

Whatever you decide to donate, whether it is $10 or $20 or $30 or $100 or . . . will be doubled. Small donations add up and make a difference, so please do your part by going to our donations page at: https://northamericankantsociety.org/donate

You have four more days – please make a donation!

Daniel Sutherland

President, North American Kant Society

p.s. NAKS is a 501(c)3, and we are more than happy to provide a tax-deduction form.

We are pleased to announce that Eli Benjamin Israel has received the NAKS Markus Herz Prize for 2024 for his paper “Kant on Moral Trust.” We also congratulate him for having his paper accepted last month for publication by Kantian Review!

Roberts Stern, a highly respected and deeply missed Kant and Hegel scholar, passed away on August 21^st of this year of brain cancer.  

After earning his PhD at Cambridge, he spent 34 years at the University of Sheffield.  

His research covered epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and political philosophy, and in addition to Kant and Hegel, his interests included Kierkegaard, Murdoch, Levinas, Peirce and Luther, and Løgstrup.  His many publications included the following books:  Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object (1990), Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification (2000), The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit (2002/2013), Hegelian Metaphysics (2009), Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard. (2011) Kantian Ethics: Value, Agency, and Obligation (2015), The Radical Demand in Løgstrup's Ethics (2019).

In addition to serving as head of the University of Sheffield Philosophy Department, he served as editor of the European Journal of Philosophy, editor of the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, President of the Hegel Society of Great Britain and President of the British Philosophical Association, and President of the Aristotelian Society.

Robert Stern was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.

More information can be found at University of Sheffield, DailyNous, and PhilPapers.