Robert Hanna

Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada (CA), but raised 350 miles east of Regina, in Winnipeg (aka "Winterpeg"), Manitoba CA—where I played hockey, wrote reams of very bad poetry, and attended the same high school as Neil Young, among other notable personal achievements—I received my PhD from Yale University USA in 1989.

I’m a philosophical generalist with a broadly Kantian orientation, whose work deals with fundamental issues and problems in the philosophy of mind-&-knowledge, philosophical logic, the philosophy of free will-&-agency, and ethics, broadly construed so as to include moral philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and sociopolitical philosophy, and I also have strong interests in the history of modern philosophy from Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes up to and including contemporary philosophy, in the philosophy of nature and natural science, and in critical metaphilosophy.

In my opinion, the fundamental problems of philosophy are these: (i) the nature of knowledge, (ii) the nature of appearance and reality, the different kinds of reality, and metaphysical realism vs. idealism, (iii) the nature of the natural or physical universe, especially including the distinction between mechanical systems and organic systems, (iv) the nature of logic and semantic meaning, including the nature of truth and falsity, (v) the nature of the mind, the mind-body relation, and mental or intentional causation, (vi) the nature and existence of free will in a natural or physical universe that our best contemporary natural science tells us is basically either deterministic or indeterministic, (vii) the nature of personhood and personal identity, (viii) the nature of human conduct and ethics or morality, social institutions, and politics, (ix) the nature and existence or non-existence of God, (x) the nature of philosophy, and (xi) the nature of human nature and the meaning or purpose of human existence or life. I've grappled with each of these eleven problems in one way or another and attempted to solve them; indeed I've recently argued that there's a hyper-fundamental problem whose solution is itself the key to the solutions of the other ten problems, in “How To Solve The Hyper-Fundamental Problem of Philosophy” (June 2024 version), available online at URL = https://www.academia.edu/120429488/How_To_Solve_The_Hyper_Fundamental_Problem_of_Philosophy_June_2024_version_.

In those areas or connections, I’ve authored or co-authored more than 150 articles (including book reviews), and fourteen books, including Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (OUP, 2001), Kant, Science, and Human Nature (OUP, 2006), Rationality and Logic (MIT, 2006), Embodied Minds in Action (co-authored with M. Maiese, OUP, 2009), In Defense of Intuitions: A New Rationalist Manifesto (co-authored with A. Chapman, A. Ellis, T. Hildebrand, and H. Pickford, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Cognition, Content, and the A Priori (OUP, 2015, aka THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 5), the first four  volumes of THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION—including the Preface and General Introduction (RHC vol. 1, Nova Science, 2018), Deep Freedom and Real Persons (RHC vol. 2, Nova Science, 2018), Kantian Ethics and Human Existence (RHC vol. 3, Nova Science, 2018), and Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism (RHC vol. 4, Nova Science, 2018)—The Mind-Body Politic (co-authored with Michelle Maiese, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019),  The Fate of Analysis (MDC, 2021), Science for Humans: Mind, Life, The Formal-&-Natural Sciences, and A New Concept of Nature (Springer Nature, 2024), and Digital Technology for Humans: The Myth of AI, Human Dignity, and Neo-Luddism (De Gruyter, forthcoming).

I’ve also written--or am in the process of writing- four other books for universal free sharing: The Limits of Sense and Reason: A Line-By-Line Critical Commentary on Kant’s "Critique of Pure Reason" (2012-2024, & Beyond), Morality and the Human Condition (2020), Thinking For a Living (2019), and Dare To Think For Yourself! (2017).

I’ve held research or teaching positions at the University of Cambridge UK, the University of Colorado at Boulder USA, the University of Luxembourg LU, PUC-PR Brazil, Yale, and York University, Canada, and I’m also a Life Member of Clare Hall College (since 1999) and Fitzwilliam College (since 2009), both at the University of Cambridge.

Since 2015, I've been an independent philosopher, Director of the online philosophy mega-project Philosophy Without Borders, Director of The Contemporary Kantian Philosophy Project, and also editor of two online journals, Borderless Philosophy and Contemporary Studies in Kantian Philosophy.