Faculty Publications

Kyla Ebels Duggan

“Learning from Love: Reasoning, Respect, and the Value of a Person,” in The Value of Humanity: A Reevaluation.  Sarah Buss and Nandi Theunissen, eds., Oxford University Press, 2023.

• We learn the moral attitude and grasp the reasons for it through experiences of loving individuals.  In interpersonal love we appreciate the value of individual persons directly.  This grasp of value plays an indispensable role in our moral convictions.  Thus, though we have sufficient reasons for our moral commitments, we cannot reason to them.  No argument addressing the moral skeptic of the kind that moral philosophers have traditionally sought is available.  Instead of leading us to moral skepticism, this should bring us to rethink our conception of moral philosophy.

 “Beyond Words: Inarticulable Reasons and Reasonable Commitments,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 98:3, May 2019, pp 623-641. 

• We often come to value someone or something through experience of that person or thing.  You may thereby come to embrace a value that you did not grasp prior to the experience in question.  Moreover, it seems that in a large and important subset of cases you could not have fully appreciated that value merely by considering a report of the reasons or arguments that purport to establish that it is valuable.  Despite its ubiquity, this phenomenon goes missing in a great deal of contemporary work in ethics and political philosophy.  In this paper I further specify the phenomenon of interest by developing a series of examples.  Then I support the claim that philosophers routinely overlook it by surveying several significant philosophical positions that do so. 

Sean Ebels-Duggan

Deductive Cardinality Results and Nuisance-Like Principles. Review of Symbolic Logic 14 (3): 592-623. 2021.

Identifying finite cardinal abstracts. Philosophical Studies 178 (5): 1603-1630. 2020.

Sanford Goldberg

Conversational Pressure: Normativity in Speech Exchanges.  (Oxford University Press, 2020.)

To the Best of Our Knowledge: Social Expectations and Epistemic Normativity.  (Oxford University Press, 2018.) 

Chad Horne

“A Market Failures Approach to Justice in Health” (co-authored with Joseph Heath). Philosophy, Politics & Economics 21.2 (2022): 165-189. 

“Two Conceptions of Solidarity in Health Care.” Social Theory & Practice 49.2 (2023): 261-285. 

Claire Kirwin

‘Value Realism and Idiosyncrasy’ (runner-up for the Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics). Oxford Studies in Metaethics 18: 24–46. 2023

‘Beyond the Birth: Middle and Late Nietzsche on the Value of Tragedy’. Inquiry 66 (7): 1283–1306. 2023

David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

Richard Kraut

 “How I Am an Aristotelian,” Dewey Lecture, American Philosophical Association Central Division, Nob.
2020, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association., 94, 97-109.

The Cambridge Companion to Plato, second edition, (co-edited with David Ebrey), Cambridge
University Press, 2022.

Cristina Lafont

“Are Human Rights Associative Rights? The Debate between Humanist and Political Conceptions of Human Rights Revisited”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISSP), 25/1 (2022), 29-49, DOI: 10.1080/13698230.2020.1859221

Democracy without Shortcuts. A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press (hardback, 2020; paperback 2022)

Thomas McCarthy

Thomas McCarthy, "On the Interest of Practical Reason in Hope," Constellations 28 (2021)

Thomas McCarthy, "Benhabib and Habermas on Discourse and Development," in Stefan Eich et al. (eds.), Another Universalism (Columbia University Press, 2023) 

José Medina

The Epistemology of Protest: Silencing, Epistemic Activism, and the Communicative Life of Resistance, (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Kenneth Seeskin

Kenneth Seeskin, "Monotheism at Bay: the Gods of Maimonides and Spinoza," in Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, ed. Steven Nadler.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 108-127.

Stephen White

Responsibility and the Demands of Morality: Collected Papers. Oxford University Press, 2025. Edited by Kyla Ebels-Duggan and Berislav Marušić

Rachel Zuckert

“Kant’s Philosophy of History, as Response to Existential Despair,” in Luigi Filieri and Sofie Møller, eds., Kant on Freedom and Human Nature (London: Routledge, 2023), 173-189.

• Abstract: Scholars often understand Kant’s progressive account of history as directed to combat moral despair. In this essay, I propose that Kant also aims to address “existential” despair at the conflictual character of human nature, displayed in the misery and folly of history. In this light, Kant’s hopes for moral-political progress may be understood as compensatory – as ways to redeem suffering or to find meaning in human existence – and the philosophy of history in which they are presented may be understood neither as guide for empirical investigation nor presupposition of moral action (as scholars have proposed), but as merely reflective judgment, an interpretation that helps human beings to make sense of painful experience.

“Adam Smith on Aesthetic Imagination and Scientific Inquiry,” British Journal of Aesthetics 2023, 1-17. doi: 10.1093/aesthj/ayad023

• Abstract: In two posthumously published essays, ‘History of Astronomy’ and ‘Of the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called The Imitative Arts’, Adam Smith suggests provocatively that philosophy is an ‘art of imagination’ and that we take the same ‘very high intellectual pleasure’ in appreciating systematic scientific theories and in listening to musical ‘systems’, i.e., complex works of non-programmatic instrumental music. In this paper, I reconstruct the view of imagination, as the cognitive faculty primarily responsible for perception and appreciation of such ‘systems’, that undergirds these claims, and argue that it is to be understood as aiming at ideal ends – in the first instance, at beauty or an order among variety (systematicity). Smith thus offers a distinctive view of aesthetic imagination, as neither freely playing nor imitative (two common views of imagination both in his time and ours) but rather as aiming at, and progressively realizing non-rational norms of order such as the systematic ideal of beauty.