“Their interests are diverse,” says Matthew Boyle, Philosophy chair and Emerson and Grace Wineland Pugh Professor of Humanities, of his department’s five assistant professors—three historians of philosophy and two specialists in contemporary analytic philosophy. “What ties them together is that their work is exceptionally innovative and of broad human significance.”

John Proios is working on a book that unpacks Plato’s famous allegory of the cave to argue that, according to the ancient philosopher, a search for truth is simultaneously a search for a different social order. Proios reasons that when a person escapes the cave—where chained prisoners mistake shadows on the wall for reality—they are not only being liberated from the world of sensory impressions, which Plato thinks are an unreliable guide to truth. They are also being liberated from Athenian society.

He is especially interested in radical, egalitarian readings of Plato. “I think one of Plato’s most charitable readers was Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, who loved the cave and thought it was a wonderful depiction of life under racial capitalism,” Proios says. He is also coediting a volume on race in Plato and Aristotle, and he has interpreted Plato as, if not a feminist, “not just another patriarchal Athenian.”

Proios also studies an area of ancient thought that is harder to find in Western philosophy departments: Buddhism. “I’m very attracted to the idea that we’re systematically wrong about what the world is,” he says. “And that is something that I think both Plato and many Buddhist thinkers have in common.”

Flashing forward 2,200 years: German philosopher Immanuel Kant, another towering figure, is a focus of two of the junior professors.

“The founding problem of Kant’s theoretical philosophy,” Thomas Pendlebury says, is that philosophers can’t agree on the nature of reality. Compared to mathematics and natural science, Kant believes, metaphysics has produced an embarrassing lack of consensus.

Kant calls his solution to this problem a “Copernican turn.” Previously, philosophers assumed that the mind knows objects by conforming to them; Kant reversed this position, arguing that the objects of our knowledge must conform to our minds. He thus reorients philosophy toward the mind and how it makes knowledge possible. Kant’s position might seem to imply that familiar objects—say, stars and stones—are dependent for their existence on our minds, but Pendlebury doesn’t think that conclusion is warranted by Kant’s writings.

Pendlebury has addressed interpretive questions in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—for instance, about the relation of sensation to concepts—that bring out new dimensions of a long-studied canonical text. He says his approach is to start from Kant’s texts, analyzing how the problem is constituted and how the argument unfolds, as opposed to a more thematic approach that looks for certain topics in Kant in order to explore them.

Maya Krishnan leans toward the latter thematic approach, investigating theology in both Kant and Hegel. “I’m interested in what their views on God can illuminate about their philosophical systems as a whole,” she says.

Kant is known for saying he must “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” He claimed that God, free will, and the soul can’t be known—they aren’t the sort of objects we can cognize—but that we are free to posit their existence beyond the reaches of human understanding.

“I’m interested in all the puzzles and questions that arise when you start asking what Kantian faith really involves,” Krishnan says. “What exactly is Kant making room for?”

Theology has functioned for philosophers as a kind of “solution space,” Krishnan says, “for thinking about what knowledge and freedom are.” Kant gives the example of a divine mind to emphasize how finite and limited humans are, whereas his German successors seemed comfortable attributing more godlike capacities to humans—including a robust notion of human freedom that Krishnan finds in Hegel. She also examines freedom or autonomy in later thinkers such as Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, who emphasize the constraints placed on humans by social categories. “I’m very interested in what it is to live a free life,” she says, “and in whether the notion of living a free life is even conceptually coherent.”

Mikayla Kelley, a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor, studies action, which philosophers define as behavior that is guided by thought. “Think of the difference,” she says, “between falling down and waving at your neighbor.”

One puzzle for action theorists is about the formation of beliefs. Some scholars say this can’t count as an action because you can’t believe something by intending it. “For example,” Kelley says, “I can’t just believe at will that there’s a God.” But we can put ourselves in situations, such as attending church, that tend to bring about that belief. Kelley argues that this is an example of a nonbasic action—an action performed by doing other actions—a concept she thinks could help shed light on mental agency generally.

In ethics, Kelley argues for metanormative realism, the view that there are objective facts about morality and rationality. Indeed, she claims we must presume such standards to engage in inquiry at all: “You have to presuppose facts about what you ought to do.”

Kelley even pursues ethical questions in virtual reality. She cites an episode of the British TV series Black Mirror in which two old friends, one of whom is married, form a romantic relationship within a video game. “Did these two have a genuine affair?” she asks. If we accept that a digital avatar can be part of us, she argues, responsibility for virtual actions seems to follow.

Ginger Schultheis views belief as a kind of bet. “For any proposition that you’ve entertained,” she says, “you’ve assigned some probability to it,” a wager on its likelihood of being true. She argues that when two people have the same prior beliefs—when they place the same epistemic bets—they cannot rationally reach different conclusions: “There could be no sense in which they agree to disagree.”

Schultheis also works on semantics, analyzing the meaning of terms such as or, not, if, then, and able. “A lot of people say that abilities are inexact,” she says. This would mean, for example, that a person could have the general ability to hit a dartboard without the specific ability to hit any given part of it. “Once you bear down on the inferences at play,” she says, “you can undermine the plausibility of this view.”

In a related project, Schultheis examines progressive sentences like “I was walking across the street.” Here again she argues for specificity: If the statement “I was driving to the Twin Cities” is true, then, according to Schultheis and her coauthor, either it’s true that I was driving to Minneapolis or it’s true that I was driving to St. Paul. It couldn’t be the case, they argue, that it’s indeterminate which city I was driving to.

Schultheis says her work, which shares similarities with formal linguistics, looks different from many people’s notion of the humanities. Still, in explicating concepts that she says are “central to our reasoning,” Schultheis shares an interest with philosophers going back to Plato and Kant.