Dr Vivek Radhakrishnan is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Division of Humanities & Social Sciences, Krea University. Before joining Krea, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay. For his doctoral research he was awarded the Junior Research Fellowship by the Indian Council of Philosophical Research (ICPR), and he received his PhD from Manipal Academy of Higher Education. His areas of research are normative ethics, meta-ethics, early modern European philosophy and 19th & 20th century Indian philosophy. Dr Radhakrishnan’s teaching experience includes his stint as a lecturer at Christ Junior College, an IB world school, where he taught theory of knowledge and ethics. At Krea, he teaches courses on philosophical methods, modern European philosophy, moral philosophy and metaphysics. Dr Radhakrishnan also translates influential philosophical texts into Tamil and is keen on seeing classical works of philosophy available in regional Indian languages.
Dr Vivek Radhakrishnan’s research interests lie in moral philosophy and history of philosophy. Philosophical questions like, “Why should we be moral?”, “What makes actions right and wrong?”, “How are we motivated to do moral actions?”, etc motivate his research. Since these are age-old questions that have been explored by various philosophers at different times, Dr Radhakrishnan is keen on studying how these fundamental questions were asked and addressed in the history of philosophy. His doctoral and postdoctoral research focussed on the problem of moral motivation as discussed by the 18th century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his PhD thesis titled Kant’s Theory of Moral Motivation, he argued for the inclusion of feeling as an essential motivational component within the rationalist Kantian ethical framework. His research articles on Kant’s practical philosophy have appeared in peer-reviewed journals like Con-textos Kantianos, Kantovskii Sbornik, Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research and Problemos. He has presented his research papers on Kant’s philosophy in international conferences organised by North American Kant Society (NAKS), Hong Kong Kant Society (HKKS) and Russian Academia Kantiana. His current research focuses on the topics of moral judgment, moral reasoning and moral motivation from within the context of early modern philosophy. Besides moral philosophy and its history, Dr Radhakrishnan is also interested in studying how 19th and 20th century Indian philosophers received and calibrated philosophical theories from modern Europe.
Philosophical Methods
Ethics
Early Modern Philosophy
Philosophical Perspectives Across Cultures
