Patrick Kain

Patrick Kain is Associate 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 was Humboldt Research Fellow at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany in 2003 and the Alvin Plantinga Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame in 2018-19. Kain received the 2021 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”.

 

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. 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). He is currently working on a book on the development of Kant’s value-centric moral philosophy.

 

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