•  134
    New Natural Law Theory and the Grounds of Marriage
    Social Theory and Practice 37 (3): 461-482. 2011.
    New natural lawyers--notably Grisez, Finnis, and George--have written much on civil marriage's moral boundaries and grounds, but with slight influence. The peripheral place of the new natural law theory (NNLT) results from the marital grounds they suggest and the exclusionary moral conclusions they draw from them. However, I argue a more authentic and attractive NNLT account of marriage is recoverable through overlooked resources within the theory itself: friendship and moral self-constitution. …Read more
  • This dissertation traces the development, and reveals the meaning, of Hegel's mature answer to the question 'what is the nature of the good life?' Its thesis is that Hegel's mature idea of the good life consists of a relationship between the citizen and the modern political community such that, properly actualized, ordinary life becomes not only fully adequate to the good but also completes, in a new form, the goals of human excellence articulated in the Aristotelian virtue of phronesis . Howeve…Read more
  •  1
    Freud's theories in light of far-from-equilibrium research
    Social Research: An International Quarterly 52 (1): 9-45. 1990.
  •  23
    The Ontology of Modern Terrorism: Hegel, Terrorism Studies and Dynamics of Violence
    with Gavin Cameron
    Cosmos and History 6 (1): 60-90. 2010.
    While the terrorism studies literature speaks of a shape of terrorism unique to modernity, the exact nature of modern terrorism, let alone the nature of modernity or its starting point, remain much in dispute. In this article we suggest that the confusion and conflict within the literature arises from a tendency to focus on certain outward or inessential features associated with modernity. In order to truly answer the question of what makes modern terrorism modern, the question needs to be set o…Read more
  • Hegel's Idea of the Good Life
    with L. De Vos
    Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 69 (4): 774. 2007.
  • Richard Schmitt, Alienation and Freedom (review)
    Philosophy in Review 23 212-214. 2003.
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    Strange Legacies of the Terror: Hegel, the French Revolution, and the Khmer Rouge Purges
    with Maureen S. Hiebert
    The European Legacy 21 (2): 145-167. 2016.
    Explanations of the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia often conflate two events: the far-ranging and self-destructive violence within the revolutionary Party, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of cadres, and the larger genocidal destruction of so-called “counter-revolutionary” classes and ethnic minorities. The exterminationist violence inflicted within the Khmer Rouge organization itself is perplexing, for its shape and sequence cannot be expla…Read more
  •  1
    Dudley Knowles, Political Philosophy Reviewed by
    Philosophy in Review 22 (4): 287-289. 2002.
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    As in the transmigration of souls after death in the Pythagorean myth that Socrates recounts in the Phaedo, for G.W.F. Hegel, in the Philosophy of Right, individuals are also 'reborn' out of their original nature into a 'second nature'. This article asks whether the Hegelian transmigration aims at their becoming nothing higher than that 'race of tame and social creatures . . . bees perhaps, wasps, or ants' which the Pythagorean myth relates is the fate of those who 'practiced popular and social …Read more
  •  28
    Hegel and the Paradox of Democratic Education
    The European Legacy 18 (3): 308-326. 2013.
    This article explores Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a work on education that responds to two democratic ideals: the ideal of individual integrity, which demands that individuals come to know the principles that animate them of their own accord, and the ideal of collectivism, which demands that individuals be at home in a shared world. While the great political works of Plato and Rousseau fasten on one of these ideals at the expense of the other, I show that Hegel’s political philosophy accepts …Read more
  • Richard Schmitt, Alienation and Freedom Reviewed by
    Philosophy in Review 23 (3): 212-214. 2003.