Mike Olson

Mike completed his PhD on Kant's conception of the mind in 2013 at Villanova University in the United States. He taught at Macquarie from 2014-2018 and he is now an Honorary Research Fellow. 

My research focuses on Immanuel Kant’s analysis of the unity of human life.  As I see it, Kant’s views on the issue can be broken down into two broad phases.  In the first phase, which begins in the 1760s and peaks with the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, Kant develops an explanation of the unity of consciousness that avoids the pitfalls of earlier metaphysical accounts bound up with ideas of the immortality and immateriality of the soul.  In what I see as the second phase of Kant’s thinking about human life, which overlaps the first in the 1770s but becomes more pronounced in the 1780s, he expands the scope of his investigation considerably.  Here he explores the political, moral, and cultural dimensions of human life, as well as asking questions about how biological structures and geographical variation impact our lives.  Kant’s approach to these areas of investigation is guided by the principles established in by the first phase of his work, but his study of the moral, political, and natural aspects of human life leads him to reconsider those principles at a number of points.  The goal of this research is, then, to provide a unified and historically sensitive explanation of Kant’s analyses of the many facets of the unity of a human life and of his efforts to reconcile the tensions that arise in trying to integrate those analyses into a systematic whole.