Research Workshop on Thomas Hobbes

March 21-22, 2009, McGill University, Montreal

Arash Abizadeh (MPhil Oxford, PhD Harvard) is associate professor of political theory at McGill University. His research focuses on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, particularly Hobbes and Rousseau, and democratic theory and questions of identity, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and border control.

Emily Carson (PhD Harvard) teaches philosophy at McGill University, and works on the impact on philosophy of developments in mathematics and science in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. Her current long-term project is a book-length examination of Kant's philosophy of mathematics with the general goal of establishing the underappreciated role of Kant's reflections on mathematical knowledge and the mathematical method in the development of his Critical philosophy.

Jeffrey Collins is an associate professor of history at Queen's University, in Ontario. He specializes in the history of early modern political and religious thought. His first book, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, was published by Oxford in 2005. He is currently working on a broad study of civil religion in early modern England.

Ioannis D. Evrigenis is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, and Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow, at the University Center for Human Values, at Princeton.  He received his PhD from Harvard University, in 2005.  His doctoral dissertation was awarded the Herrnstein Prize.  He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Earhart Foundation, among others, as well as five Certificates of Distinction in Teaching from Harvard University's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.  He is co-editor of Johann Gottfried Herder's Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings (Hackett, 2004), and the author of Fear of Enemies and Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and of articles on a wide range of issues in political thought.  At present, he is working on a study of the state of nature in political thought, and another on Plato's Socrates.

Michael Green (PhD Berkeley) teaches philosophy at Pomona University. His has recently published papers on justice, nationalism, Hobbes, and Hume, and is presently working on Hobbes’s moral theory and questions about human rights and global justice.

Kinch Hoekstra recently moved from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he was the Fellow in Ancient and Modern Philosophy at Balliol College, to the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches the history of political thought and political philosophy in the Department of Political Science and the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law.

Douglas Jesseph (PhD Princeton) is professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis (Chicago), Berkeley's Philosophy of Mathematics (Chicago), and essays on early modern philosophy of mathematics and methodology. He is currently engaged in editing three volumes of Hobbes's mathematical works for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes.

Vera Keller recently defended her dissertation in history at Princeton, on the international career of the Dutch natural philosopher and engineer Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633), and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at McGill's Making Publics Project. She is now working on a series of articles on the pan-European history of wish-lists (desiderata) in programs of political/economic/philosophic reform, from Jakob Bornitz and Francis Bacon at the turn of the seventeenth-century, to the early eighteenth-century. Forthcoming works include “From Secrets to Desiderata in the Hartlib Circle,” Reordering the World: Textual Technologies and Early Modern Natural Knowledge, ed. Matthew Eddy, and “How to Become a Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosopher: The Case of Cornelis Drebbel,” Knowledge Affairs in the Early Modern Low Countries, ed. Sven Dupré and Christoph Lüthy, (LIT Verlag).

Ed King is assistant professor of political science at Concordia University in Montreal.

Michael LeBuffe is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, specializing in the history of early modern philosophy. His recent publications include,  "Spinoza's Normative Ethics" (Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37:3) and "Hobbes's Reply to the Fool" (Philosophy Compass 2:1). His book, From Bondage to Freedom: Spinoza on Human Excellence, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University, a member of the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique, Secretary-Treasurer of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, and Early Modern and Enlightenment Editor of the Sage Encyclopedia of Political Theory.  He is the author of The Multiculturalism of Fear (Oxford) and of articles on multiculturalism, federalism, eighteenth-century political thought, the history of liberal and constitutional thought, and the rights of indigenous peoples in journals such as The American Political Science Review, Political Theory, History of Political Thought, and Nomos.  He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University and an LL.M from the University of Chicago Law School.

Catherine Lu is Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill. She is the author of Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), as well as of numerous articles in journals such as The Journal of Political Philosophy, Review of International Studies, Journal of International Law and International Relations, The European Journal of Social Theory, and the Journal of International Political Theory. Lu teaches courses on international political theory, global justice, and problems of justice and reconciliation. Her current book project addresses problems of moral accounting after oppression, atrocity and war.

Víctor M. Muñiz-Fraticelli is Assistant Professor of Law and Political Science at McGill University. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago, and his JD from the University of Puerto Rico. He is currently working on the justification and institutional requirements of associational autonomy. He also works on contemporary liberal theory, with special emphasis on the work of John Rawls, on intergenerational justice, and on the relationship of private law to sovereignty and constitutionalism. His chapter on "The problem of a perpetual constitution" is forthcoming in Intergenerational Justice, ed. L. Meyer and A. Gosseries (Oxford, 2009).

Patrick Neal is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont, where he teaches courses in political theory.  Professor Neal received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.  His research centers on modern liberalism and its critics.  He is the author of Liberalism and its Discontents (NYU, 1998) and is at work on a book on religion and liberal political theory.

Dario Perinetti (PhD McGill) teaches philosophy at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His research focuses on the period from Hume to Hegel and, in particular, on the role that the understanding of history plays in the philosophical projects of this period.

Will Roberts received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Pen State University in 2005. He currently teaches philosophy and political theory at McGill University. His research centers on Aristotle, Marx and Marxism, critiques of liberalism, and political violence.

Justin E. H. Smith (Ph.D. Columbia 2000) is associate professor of philosophy at Concordia University. His principal research focus is on the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz. He has a book forthcoming; entitled Divine Machines: Leibniz's Philosophy of Biology (Princeton University Press, 2009), and is currently preparing a critical edition and translation, with François Duchesneau, of the Negotium Otiosum of 1720 and related texts pertaining to the controversy between Leibniz and the German vitalist physician Georg Ernst Stahl, for the Yale Leibniz series (Yale University Press, 2011). He has published widely on the intersection between philosophy and the empirical life sciences in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a particular focus on the philosophical problems arising in early modern biological taxonomy and in generation theory. He also has a developing research interest in philosophical anthropology from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and in particular the philosophical debates of the period concerning human origins, the nature of human diversity, and the place of human beings in the order of nature.

Travis D. Smith (Harvard University, 2005) teaches political theory at Concordia University in Montreal. He has published on Hobbes's ideas regarding gratitude, friendship, and religion. He has also published on Francis Bacon's Machiavellianism and currently continues his work on the role of medicine in early modern thought.

Tom Sorell is John Ferguson Professor, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Birmingham. He is author of Hobbes (Routledge, 1986) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge, 1994); Hobbes and History (Routledge, 2000) (with John Rogers); Leviathan After 350 Years (Oxford, 2005) (with Luc Foisneau); Leviathan Between the Wars (Peter Lang, 2005) (with Luc Foisneau and J-C Merle).

Christina Tarnopolsky is Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University since July 2005.  Her area of specialty is ancient Greek political thought with a specific focus on the works of Plato; current research interests include the role of the emotions and the place of the aesthetic in moral and political thought. She has just finished a book manuscript entitled Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants: Plato and the Politics of Shame to be published by Princeton University Press. The book articulates three different models of a politics of shame derived from Plato’s dialogue, the Gorgias.  It shows how these different political uses of shame allow one to theorize the salutary and pernicious place of this emotion in democratic politics better than contemporary theories of shame and civility.

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