| Research
Projects. My research is perhaps best understood through the visual metaphor of a spoked wheel. At the center lies my enduring interest in the work of John Rawls, taken both on its own terms and in relationship to the history of philosophy generally and various developments 20th century philosophy more particularly. I expect in the near term to indulge this core interest by beginning to work on an intellectual biography of Rawls, a daunting task. Various spokes connect this central interest with a range of satellite interests. These include: a) criteria of legitimacy for coercive state action, political obligation, the nature of public reason and the role of religious discourse within it, ideals of citizenship and civic virtue; b) international justice, human rights, just war, reparations; c) the general conceptual relationship between morality, coercion, and law, legal authority, legal obligation; d) American constitutionalism, the nature and justification of judicial review, theories of constitutional interpretation and adjudication; e) oppression theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, all taken as challenges to the so-called liberal orthodoxy; f) American philosophy as distinctive; g) the history of moral and political philosophy, especially Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill and Sidgwick; and h) the relationships between history, reason, the social nature of humankind, and freedom. For a list of (and in many cases links to) recent and forthcoming papers, see my vita.
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