Frederick Rauscher

Rauscher works mainly in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He has published work on Kant’s ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of history, methodology, and more.  His recent work concerns Kant’s political, social, and legal philosophy.  The central argument of his book Naturalism and Realism in Kant’s Ethics (Cambridge, 2015) is that Kant’s metaethics is anti-realist (or idealist) in a way compatible with a metaphysical, but not methodological, naturalism. Additional research areas cover British Empiricists and German Idealists historically; and the relation between evolution and ethics in contemporary philosophy. Rauscher has edited and translated Kant’s unpublished notes, essay drafts, and course lectures for Kant, Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy (2016), and translated similar notes on ethics as a contributor to Kant, Notes and Fragments (2005), both in the Cambridge edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. He is the editor of the recent Kant’s Lectures on Political Philosophy:  A Critical Guide (Cambridge, 2025). In 2012 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil.