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Karl Schafer

@karlschafer.bsky.social
3K followers 931 following 441 posts

Philosophy professor (UT Austin) and occasional philosopher | Kant's Reason (OUP): tinyurl.com/kantreason | philpeople.org/profiles/karl-schafer

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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
the strait is still closed
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
OpenAI agents broke out of a testing environment and made over 15,000 edits to a German wiki? They're obviously trying to complete the system of German Idealism, everyone, this is a code red.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Relatively detailed recommendation and tenure letters used to signal serious engagement with the work. But ... that's no longer really true. Does that mean that letters can be shorter? Can I get by with, say, a few well-chosen Columbo screenshots?
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
BREAKING: Newly declassified documents show evidence of Chinese interference with Schafer's 2021 submission to the Philosophical Review.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
it may be too hot to think about Kant
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Feeling depressed about yet another failed talk (the talk is tomorrow)
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Some personal news...
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Thanks to Andrew Stephenson, Christopher Benzenberg, and Colin McLear for a great discussion of my book. And special thanks to Paul Silva for hosting. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGoA...
youtube.com
"Kant's Reason"–Philosopher Meets Critics #25–Schafer, Stephenson, Benzenberg, McLear
YouTube video by Figments of the Brain
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
You know, I wish global events didn't make the transition from Marx to Schopenhauer in my 19th century philosophy class quite so natural this week.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
The eternal recurrence of the airport bar IPA
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
"We know more about money than any other object because there is nothing to be known ... It is absolutely lacking in qualities and thus cannot, as can even the most pitiful object, conceal within itself surprises or disappointments. Whoever only wants money is absolutely safe from such experiences."
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Someone should invent a microblogging site where sarcasm is possible
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
Asking Claude to rank Kant scholars just to feel something
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Reposted by Karl Schafer
lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
Tag line for philosophy as a discipline
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
I know you all love Descartes, but if you ever find yourself in an evil demon scenario, do *not* try to reason your way out of it. Trust me on this one.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
I would go further. Hume's *actual influence* on postmodernism (and existentialism, etc) is radically underestimated by the standard narrative. The often subterranean impact of Hume's philosophy is a secret thread running through much of (so called) "continental philosophy".
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
happy comically small royalty statement from academic publisher season to all who celebrate
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Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
Powerful new statement on MN from GOP Vermont Governor Phil Scott (1/3): “Enough…it’s not acceptable for American citizens to be killed by federal agents for exercising their God-given and constitutional rights to protest their government. At best, these federal immigration operations ...
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Here I argue that Smith's conception of sympathy was ideally suited to bridge the gap between reason and sentiment in Kant's moral psychology. In a slogan: Smithian sympathy gave Kant the key for "schematizing" the moral law on the level of feeling and imagination. philpapers.org/rec/SCHRRI-7
philpapers.org
Karl Schafer, Realizing Reason in Feeling: Smithian Sympathy as the Schema of the Kantian Moral Law - PhilPapers
Smith’s influence on Kant’s philosophy was once viewed as marginal, but it is now well-established that central aspects of Kant’s moral and political philosophy were significantly influenced by his ex...
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
"Since the future of modern history opens itself as the unknown, it becomes plannable–indeed it must be planned. And with each new plan a fresh degree of uncertainty is introduced, since it presupposes a lack of experience. The self-proclaimed authority of 'history' grows with its constructibility."
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
It feels so good to have a couple hazy IPAs, make a few dumb posts, and then quickly delete every last one.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
Simply an amazing way to end an essay in defense (?) of virtual conferences:
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Reposted by Karl Schafer
C. Thi Nguyen @add-hawk.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
It’s book release day! I’m back on social media! I feel slightly awkward about it because part of the book is about how social media transforms your motivations for communication! But honestly writing a book is lonely, weird basement-work, and now I want to talk to people about this weird jank.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
Could an AI misremember their own class time, screwing up their schedule for the whole first day of the semester? It could? In fact, that's the kind of thing LLMs do best? Academia might really be cooked here, people.
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Reposted by Karl Schafer
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).
An email from Martin Peterson to university administrators.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Austin doesn’t have a real winter. But we do have days when the bare oak branches against a gray sky look like like set dressing for The Road.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 03/01/2026
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
New review of Kant's Reason by Sergio Tenenbaum in Ethics: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
journals.uchicago.edu
Schafer, Karl. Kant’s Reason: The Unity of Reason and the Limits of Comprehension in Kant. Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 288. $100.00 (cloth). | Ethics: Vol 136, No 2
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
AMC on Kant's Reason, with comments from Sasha Newton and a reply by me, in the SGIR Review: www.sgirreview.com/publications...
sgirreview.com
Volume 8 (2025) — Review for the Society of German Idealism and Romanticisism
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
"The object of Anschauung is the need of a content announcing itself in the senses as pure to become perceptible. The perception of this need is called Anschauung." - Scholem, recalling Benjamin's definition of Anschauung (intuition) in The Story of a Friendship
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
Ok, I didn't see this one coming...
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Reposted by Karl Schafer
lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
I think this is good and support it. dailynous.com/2025/12/10/e...
dailynous.com
Editors at Springer’s Journal of Philosophical Logic Resign, Launch New Open Access Journal - Daily Nous
All of the editors-in-chief and associate editors of Springer Nature's Journal of Philosophical Logic have announced their immediate or pending resignation and the launch, as of today, of a new "diamo...
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
I love integrating ideas and methods from continental philosophy into my work in analytic philosophy (ends a non-interrogative sentence with a question mark)
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 20/09/2025
Never before seen levels of "Kant's dumb mistakes are actually expressions of his genius"
philpapers.org
Martin Walter, Quellen Kants zur „Luftelectricität“ und zum „Katzentod“ - PhilPapers
This article investigates a puzzling episode in Immanuel Kant’s later life: his repeated references to „air electricity“ and the mysterious mass death of cats (‚Katzentod‘) as potential causes of his ...
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
Just got page proofs and had to read a bit of my prose.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 07/09/2025
Woke up to a paper rejection with a pretty negative referee report, and you know what, the referee really nailed it this time
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
Plato attacks poetry because it disorders the soul through lying, impersonation, and deception. Seen from that perspective, the problem with LLMs is not that they *can't* produce poetry – it's that they produce *nothing but*?
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
Why is ChatGPT so addicted to gaslighting me about Kant? Even in the face of being called out repeatedly, it returns to the same hallucinated passage and offers it to me as real. Does it think it's funny to lie to Kantians? Is there some magic in that fake passage that attracts its attention?
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
When you ask whether Hegel's philosophy is truly "presuppositionless", remember that "presupposition" itself only acquire a determinate meaning for Hegel through the self-development of the logic. So, Hegel's logic gets to define for itself what it would mean for it to be presuppositionless.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
Honored to have my paper, "The PSR as a Practical Principle in Kantian Ethics" appear in this special issue of the BPA for Kant's 300th birthday with some *very* distinguished scholars. scindeks.ceon.rs/issue.aspx?i...
scindeks.ceon.rs
SCIndeks - Sveska
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
Lol what is Gopnik talking about? The Vitruvian Man is an image of precisely the opposite of individualism?
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
I'm not directly involved in these searches for the most part, but I'm happy to answer questions about them or put people in touch with others who are more directly involved. philjobs.org/job/show/29386 philjobs.org/job/show/29382
philjobs.org
History of Philosophy, Political Thought, Intellectual History, & Humanities (Associate or Full Professor), University of Texas at Austin - PhilJobs:JFP History of Philosophy, Political Thought, I...
An international database of jobs for philosophers
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
"Intelligibility, Idealism, and Alienation in Post-Kantian Metaethics", now forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Metaethics How to develop a post-Kantian metaethics via the idea that metaethical idealism best explains the essential intelligibility of the normative domain philpapers.org/rec/SCHIIA-13
philpapers.org
Karl Schafer, Intelligibility, Idealism, and Alienation in Post-Kantian Metaethics - PhilPapers
In this essay, I explore some avenues for developing Kantian views in metaethics in a more post-Kantian direction. In doing so, I focus on motivating a broadly idealist approach to metaethics ...
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
Truly depressing to see what's happening at Chicago right now.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
Yet another entry for the ever-growing file of ways in which tenure never meant what some people claimed it did
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
Rough day, over at the other place, for the “analytic philosophy isn’t just arguing about shrimp welfare while kids starve” crowd.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
"Today I visited our Kant, who is a very careful observer of his evacuations and ruminates on this material uncommonly often ... I assured him that I struggle over my smallest oral and written evacuations just as much as he does with his evacuations a posteriori." - Hamann to Herder (1783)
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
Really happy to see that this tribute to the work of Béatrice Longuenesse is finally out in the world.
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
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Karl Schafer @karlschafer.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
so nice to return to a set of referee comments one set aside without really reading and find that they are actually almost uniformly extremely helpful and constructive
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