Gerad Gentry, Ph.D.

Gerad Gentry works on a broad conception of the normativity of action and agency that spans metaethics, aesthetics, and theoretical philosophy. He is interested in the relation between, necessity in, and developmental nature of action, rational agency, freedom, normativity itself, and flourishing. He is interested in normativity not primarily as externally imposed constraints, but as arising from the constitutive conditions and self-determining activity of agents, and forms of minded life (the sociality of reason displayed in institutions, laws, nations, and the constitutive nature of these across time).

He serves as the Director of Baylor’s Philosophy, Literature, and Social Thought in Europe

Steering Committee Chair for the Texas Consortium in Classical German Philosophy

President of The Society for German Idealism and Romanticism
 

Education

Ph.D. University of  Cambridge, St. John's College

Ph.D. University of South Carolina

M.A. University of Chicago

B.A. Houghton College

Select Publications

Hegel on Freedom and Ethical Life, Cambridge University Press, 2026. 

 “Hegel and the Role of Literature in Ethical Theory” in Hegel and Literary Studies, edited by Allen Speight. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming: 1-26

“Dialectic Constitutivism,” The Monist, forthcoming 2027

“Logical Form and Radical Skepticism: a Specter of Cassirer and Hegel in the 21st century" with Luigi Filieri, Inquiry, 2026: 1-24

“Activity and Actuality in the Life of the Mind: Hegel and the Greeks” Notre Dame Studies in the Philosophy of the Life of the Mind, edited by Katharina Kraus and Stephen Ogden. Springer, forthcoming: 1-33

“Hegel’s End of Art and the Artwork as an Internally Purposive Whole” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 61(3), 2023: 473-498.

"Artworks are Valuable for their own Sake"  Journal of the American Philosophical Association: 9(2), 2023: 234-252

"Pure Synthesis and the Principle of the Synthetic Unity of Apperception" Kant-Studien 113, no. 1, 2022: 8-39.

Edited volumes:

Art, Nature, and Self-formation in the Age of Goethe, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024. 305 pages. 

Kantian Legacies in German Idealism. In Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2021. 288 pages.

The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2019. 278 pages.