Patrick Kain

Patrick Kain is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University and a founding faculty fellow in the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts Program. His primary teaching responsibilities and scholarly interests are in ethics, the history of modern philosophy, and transformative texts. He received his PhD from the University of Notre Dame and joined the Purdue faculty in 2000. Kain received the 2022 Henry Allison Senior Scholar Prize from the North American Kant Society for the best published paper on Kant in 2020-2021 for his “The Development of Kant’s Conception of Divine Freedom”.

He was the Alvin Plantinga Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame in 2018-19 and Humboldt Research Fellow at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany in 2003. 

 

Kain’s scholarship aims to understand the nature of moral obligation and the way that human nature and human dignity figure into the foundations of ethics, particularly in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and in the Kantian tradition. In Kant and the Origins of the Good Will (Oxford University Press, 2025), Kain establishes the centrality of the good will and the dignity of humanity in Kant’s moral philosophy through the examination of Kant’s early published works, notes and drafts, and student notes from lectures across various disciplines over the course of several decades leading up to the publication of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). The author of numerous articles and chapters on Kant, Kain also co-edited Essays on Kant’s Anthropology (Cambridge, 2003; with Brian Jacobs) and Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief: Disagreement and Evolution (Oxford, 2014; with Michael Bergmann).

 

Kain is an advocate and ambassador for free inquiry, academic freedom, and shared governance on college campuses.