H.C. (Hanno) Sauer, MA

Position:
  • PhD Candidate
Expertise:
  • Practical Rationality
  • Moral Psychology
  • Social Philosophy and Social Critique
  • Metaethics


Telephone number: +31 (0)71 527 4120
E-Mail: h.c.sauer@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Faculty / Department: Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen, Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte
Office Address: Witte Singel-complex
Witte Singel 25/M. de Vrieshof 4
2311 BZ Leiden
Room number 009B


Biography

Hanno Sauer (1983) is a PhD student at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and the University of Leiden. He studied Philosophy and Literature at the Philipps-Universiät Marburg and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. In 2009, he received an M.A. in both subjects from the University of Frankfurt.

His thesis on the role of the concept of instrumental reason in social philosophy was supervised by Axel Honneth and Rainer Forst and published as a book in 2009 (Who’s Afraid of Instrumental Reason?Instrumentelle Vernunft und die Diagnose sozialer Pathologien. Marburg, Tectum.)

In 2011, he spent three months as a visiting scholar at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (faculty contact: Prof. Jesse Prinz) and at Columbia University (faculty contact: Prof. Axel Honneth)

In his PhD thesis (supervision: Prof. Pauline Kleingeld), he defends an empirically feasible rationalist account of the psychology of moral judgment and his reasoning.

Research

My research focuses on the philosophical implications of recent findings in empirical moral psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I reassess these findings from a normative perspective and try to explore the connections between practical rationality, emotion and moral judgment. The all-important question is whether the empirical data supports the claim that emotionally triggered "gut reactions" are necessary and/or sufficient for moral judgment or whether there is room for a normative conception of moral deliberation and agency.

For more information, see 'Published Work'.

Teaching

2012 (Fall), University of Leiden, Kant and Kantian Ethics (BA3).

2010 (Fall), University of Leiden, Reason, Emotion, and the Psychology of Moral Judgment (BA3).

2006-2009, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt: Tutor
(Introduction to Practical Philosophy and the History of Philosophy).

2004-2006, Philipps-Universität Marburg: Tutor
(Introduction to Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, and Logical Propaedeutics).

Last Modified: 03-02-2012