Annual Philosophy Lecture 2027: Autonomy, Personhood, and Women's Rights | Prof. Özlem Duva Kaya

Autonomy, Personhood, and Women’s Rights: Kantian Parallels in First-Wave Feminist Thought

The Annual Philosophy Lecture for 2027 to be delivered by Prof. Özlem Duva Kaya will examine the conceptual and normative relationship between Kant’s moral philosophy and the emergence of the first wave of feminist thought. Despite Kant's own historically situated and, in certain respects, explicitly gendered remarks about women, Prof. Özlem Duva Kaya will argue that the broader structure of Kant's practical philosophy contains conceptual possibilities that transcend these limitations.

Rather than treating these remarks as simply external to his system, the lecture will focus on the tension within Kant’s thought between his universal account of rational agency and his empirically conditioned assumptions about women. Rather than approaching this tension in reductive terms, the lecture treats it as analytically productive, opening a space in which Kant’s core concepts can be reconsidered within a broader normative framework. Within this framework,…