In the past few years the ‘migration crisis’ has challenged the EU’s internal cohesion and has been instrumentally used by populist and nationalist movements to raise public concerns. At the same time, terrorist attacks have multiplied in Europe and some of them have been perpetrated by migrants of first or second generation claiming allegiance to Islamic fundamentalist groups.
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Last April the Hungarian parliament approved a new law that regulates the operations of foreign (non-EEA) universities in Hungary. Among other things, the new law requires a bilateral agreement between Hungary and the country of the university’s origin, and they should also deliver education programs in the countries where they are accredited. Although ‘lex CEU’, as has been popularly referred to, was defended on purely administrative grounds it clearly is part of an orchestrated attack on free institutions—NGOs, independent media, and the judiciary. At the time, it seemed impossible for CEU to fulfil these conditions: deadlines were tight, the costs were enormous since CEU has no educational activity in the US where it is accredited, and securing a bilateral treaty with the US government was unfeasible since, American educational matters are regulated at State level rather than at the federal’s level.
If you consider yourself a political philosopher, it seems that you must be doing political philosophy. What does this political constraint imply? To me, it does certainly not imply that you are not allowed to used farfetched hypothetical thought-experiments, or that you take a specific stand on ideal contra non-ideal theory. Nor does it imply that it is morally impermissible for us to raise certain philosophical questions, if we foresee a reasonable chance that answering these questions could make the world worse or more unjust, as some activists claim. What it implies is that you should acknowledge the political relevance of your philosophical work, and that you have a commitment to make this relevance explicit.
Associate Professorship of Political Theory, University of Oxford (closing 7/12/17)
Assistant Professor in Political Theory, Carleton University (closing 1/12/17)
Lecturer in Philosophy (30 months fixed term), University of Birmingham (closing 29/11/17)
Tenure-track position in Business Ethics, KU Leuven (closing 31/01/18)
Doctoral Scholarships (open to political theory/philosophy/ethics applicants), Central European University (closing 01/02/18)
As part of my long-term project to convince political theorists that they can benefit from cooperating with empirical social scientists (see also here), I’ve recently written a paper on an intriguing argument about social justice that I found in the writings of Émile Durkheim, who is widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of sociology. I here present a short summary; the full paper can be found here.
September’s general elections have brought Germany its own Brexit/Trump moment. For the first time since 1945 a far right nationalist party is part of the German national parliament. The Alternative for Germany, AfD, gained 12,6 % of German votes. Given the AfD’s increasing popularity in the polls and the resurging nationalism over the last years this wasn’t a shock moment in the way that Brexit or Trump’s election was. Yet, there is something particularly troubling about seeing Nazis back in the German parliament. One common response is that ‘we need to take the worries of the AfD voters more seriously’. They have been overlooked and here we are. But: What does it mean ‘to take seriously’? And who is this ‘we’ that is supposed to take seriously?
I recently wrote a review for an introductory philosophy text on climate justice. I thought it was a good book. The only criticism of it that I raised felt somewhat unfair, and hypocritical, since it is really a criticism that applies to the book’s field rather than the book itself – and to myself as somebody who works within this field. Namely, that discussions of climate justice in analytic philosophy (of the kind that I was schooled in, at least) have a tendency to be problematically insular, or even exclusionary. My worry is that a lot of the literature I read on climate justice is written by people like me, and (implicitly or explicitly) addressed to people like me. Roughly speaking: academics working in the tradition of analytic ethics and political philosophy; writing in English; located in Europe, North America, or Australia; and relatively privileged in terms of their resources, opportunities for consumption, and low vulnerability to climate change.
Stanford Center for Ethics in Society Post-Doctoral Fellowships
Professor in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, University of Warwick
Lecturer in Politics (open to political theory applicants), University of York
Department Lecturer in Political Theory, University of Oxford
Departmental Lecturer in Ethics, University of Oxford
Political theory hasn’t been neglected by the podcast boom, but it’s not always easy to know where to go. Here, I list (with links) the best political theory/philosophy related content in the podverse. (There are also some iTunes U courses and related suggestions below).
There is currently a lot of attention on the UK’s “housing crisis”. One issue here is 
the quantity of available housing. There are commitments to address the shortage of housing in the 2017 manifestos of both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. Another issue is the quality of housing. On this issue, the Labour Party have restated the commitment they made in a 2015 Homes Bill to require that all homes meet the standard of being “fit for human habitation”. In this post, I explore the reasons in favour of this commitment.
