John Davenport studied Philosophy at Yale University and completed his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in 1998. Since then, he has taught in the undergraduate and graduate programs at Fordham University in New York City, where he served as Associate Chair and Associate Director of Environmental Studies.
John has published widely on topics in free will and responsibility, existential conceptions of practical identity, virtue ethics, motivation and autonomy, theories of justice, and philosophy of religion. With Anthony Rudd, John co-edited the 2001 collection, Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, which defends the relevance of …
John Davenport studied Philosophy at Yale University and completed his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in 1998. Since then, he has taught in the undergraduate and graduate programs at Fordham University in New York City, where he served as Associate Chair and Associate Director of Environmental Studies.
John has published widely on topics in free will and responsibility, existential conceptions of practical identity, virtue ethics, motivation and autonomy, theories of justice, and philosophy of religion. With Anthony Rudd, John co-edited the 2001 collection, Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, which defends the relevance of Kierkegaard's ideas for contemporary debates in moral psychology and virtue ethics. His book, Will as Commitment and Resolve (Fordham University Press, 2007) draws on ideas from the existential tradition to defend a conception of willing as the capacity to set new ends based on the recognition of values that transcend the agent's own good.
Since then, John has published a trilogy of essays on faith in Kierkegaard's thought, four essays on topics in political philosophy (especially concerning human rights and the need for a global federation of democracies), and a new monograph in moral psychology titled Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality: from Frankfurt and MacIntyre to Kierkegaard (Routledge, 2012). He hopes to follow this up with a monograph on existential conceptions of personal autonomy and authenticity resolving problems with Harry Frankfurt's hierarchical approach and his theories of caring and identity-defining commitments. This new existential model of autonomy is sketched in the narrative book, and depends on the conception of projective striving developed in the will-book. He also has three book projects in political philosophy, including a systematic critique of political libertarianism.
