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13David Lay Williams, Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment. Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 30 (4): 309-311. 2010.
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Kant's Sexual ContractJournal of Politics 76 914-27. 2014.Kant's views on sex and marriage deserve the renewed attention of political scientists for three reasons. First, Kant's theory of marriage was shaped by his engagement with Rousseau's political thought and especially his Social Contract—a key if unappreciated side of his engagement with Rousseau. Second, Kant's application of Rousseau's political theory to marriage suggests an egalitarian view of marriage's nature and function that helpfully illuminates marriage's role in a liberal society of fr…Read more
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48Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, free will, and the passionsContemporary Political Theory 17 (S1): 35-38. 2018.
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45Social science and human flourishing: The scottish enlightenment and todayJournal of Scottish Philosophy 7 (1): 29-46. 2009.The Scottish Enlightenment is commonly identified as the birthplace of modern social science. But while Scottish and contemporary social science share a commitment to empiricism, contemporary insistence on the separation of empirical analysis from normative judgment invokes a distinction unintelligible to the Scots. In this respect the methods of modern social science seem an attenuation of those of Scottish social science. A similar attenuation can be found in the modern aspiration to judge the…Read more
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39Love’s Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in ModernityCambridge University Press. 2017.A number of prominent moral philosophers and political theorists have recently called for a recovery of love. But what do we mean when we speak of love today? Love's Enlightenment examines four key conceptions of other-directedness that transformed the meaning of love and helped to shape the way we understand love today: Hume's theory of humanity, Rousseau's theory of pity, Smith's theory of sympathy, and Kant's theory of love. It argues that these four Enlightenment theories are united by a sha…Read more
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40Aristotle on the greatness of greatness of soulHistory of Political Thought 23 (1): 1-20. 2002.Magnanimity is often regarded as the heroic virtue of glory-seeking warriors and honour-loving aristocrats. But in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle presents magnanimity as a civic rather than a heroic virtue. By attending to Aristotle's often overlooked accounts of his indifference to honour and his attitudes towards fortune and towards others, I aim to show that so far from seeking only glory or self-sufficiency, the magnanimous man realizes his true greatness and nobility in his beneficence to…Read more
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37Thoreau among his heroesPhilosophy and Literature 25 (1): 59-74. 2001.For a book that implores its readers to “simplify, simplify,” Walden has more than its fair share of obscurity. Lovers of simplicity have long mined it for its clear and comforting maxims, only to leave behind more than a few tough nuts for those who incline towards the esoteric—which, for Thoreau, is the essence of the philosophical. To the former set of readers he offers an apology: “You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not volunt…Read more
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Marquette UniversityRegular Faculty
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |