Ethics, Politics, and Law
Many faculty research projects assess particular conditions that enable or frustrate the realization of lives well-lived, including non-human lives such as socio-institutional trends, material conditions, interpersonal relations, and individual habits and capacities.
Particular projects involve shame, happiness, friendship and love, the many shapes of racism, sexism, and coloniality, freedom and equality, democratic culture and deliberation, justice, the rule of law, judicial review, cosmopolitanism, class, and interspecies ethics.
In pursuing these projects, many theoretical orientations and methodologies operate, even as the nature of social explanation is its own project. Approaches include various critical theories, democratic theory, feminism, liberalism, post-colonial and de-colonial theory, pragmatism, and psychoanalysis, often in dialogue with other disciplines like anthropology, ecology, legal theory, physics, and psychology.
Selected Publications
Dilek Huseyinzadegan. Kant's Nonideal Theory of Politics (Chicago: Northwestern University, 2019).
John Lysaker. “Looking After the Future: Notes on Hope.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy Volume 33. No. 2. 2019.
John Lysaker. “Finding My Way Through Moral Space.” Epochê. Vol. 17. No. 1 Fall 2012
John Lysaker. “Praxis and Form: Thirty Notes for an Ethics of the Future.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Volume 25. No. 2, 2011
Marta Jimenez. "Self-Love and the Unity of Justice in Aristotle." Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 23:2. 2019. 413-429.
Noëlle McAfee. “Refugees and the Right To Politics,” Refugees Now, edited by Kelly Oliver, Lisa Madura, and Sabeen Ahmed, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
Noëlle McAfee. “Trump and the Paranoid-Schizoid Politics of Ideality,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 21:5, 556-563, DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2017.1437705, March 2018.
Noëlle McAfee. “Neoliberalism and Other Political Imaginaries,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, Volume: 43 issue: 9, page(s): 911-931 Article first published online: June 29, 2017; Issue published: November 1, 2017.
John J. Stuhr. Philosophy and Human Flourishing: Good Lives and How to Live Them, ed. John J. Stuhr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022, in press).
John J. Stuhr. Cosmopolitanism and Place, ed. Jessica T. Wahman, Jose M. Medina, and John J. Stuhr (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017).
John J. Stuhr. “Truth, Truths and Pluralism: The War on Truth,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 34, #4, 2020.
Jessica T. Wahman, José M. Medina, and John J. Stuhr, eds. Cosmopolitanism and Place Indiana University Press, 2017.
Jessica T. Wahman. “The Idea(s) of America,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol 31.1, 2017.
Cynthia Willett. “Beastly Morality: Untangling Possibilities,” Epilogue to Beastly Morality, Jonathan Crane Ed. Columbia University Press, 2015 – with Ani Satz, Jonathan Crane and Lori Marino
Cynthia Willett. Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom. Indiana University Press, 2008
Recent Courses
500 Aristotle on Justice (Jimenez)501 Plato and Aristotle on Democracy and Tyranny, Freedom and Oppression (Jimenez)
525 Origins of Modern Political Philosophy
525 Sovereignty and Individual Rights
525 Kant's Practical Philosophy (Huseyinzadegan)
541 Virtue Ethics & Existentialism
551 Ethics, Neuroscience, Philosophical Psychology, and Animal Studies (Willett)
570 Accounting for Ourselves: Butler, Habermas, Cavell (Lysaker)
571 Habermas and his Critics (McAfee)
551 Cosmopolitanism (Stuhr)
571 Liberalism and its Critics (Stuhr)
789 Equality, Meritocracy, and Democracy (Stuhr)
789 Critical Legal Studies and Theory (Sullivan)
789 20th Century Legal Theory (Sullivan)
789 Relation, Affect, and Eros Ethics (Willett)