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131Book Review: Public Passion: Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice (review)Political Theory 40 (4): 527-531. 2012.
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109Commerce and CorruptionEuropean Journal of Political Theory 7 (2): 137-158. 2008.Modern commercial society has been criticized for attenuating virtue and inhibiting the ethical self-realization of its participants. But Adam Smith, a founding father of liberal commercial modernity, anticipated precisely this critique and took specific measures to circumvent it. This article presents these measures via an analysis of his response to the critique of liberal commercial modernity set forth by Rousseau. It principally argues that Smith's distinctions of the love of praise from the…Read more
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64Rousseau’s Virtue EpistemologyJournal of the History of Philosophy 50 (2): 239-263. 2012.Rousseau’s moral and political philosophy is grounded in a largely overlooked virtue epistemology. This essay reconstructs this epistemology with a particular focus on Rousseau’s conception of how our capacity for sensation might be cultivated to develop the judgment and wisdom that distinguish the developed virtuous agent. It proceeds in three sections. The first section focuses on Rousseau’s conception of the first stage of development, and especially his sensationist claim that all knowledge …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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45David Hume and the “Politics of Humanity”Political Theory 39 (2): 205-233. 2011.Recently a call has gone up for a revival of the "politics of humanity." But what exactly is the "politics of humanity"? For illumination this paper turns to Hume's analysis of humanity's foundational role in morality and modern politics. Its aims in so doing are twofold. First, it aims to set forth a new understanding of the unity of Hume's practical and epistemological projects in developing his justifications for and the implications of his remarkable and underappreciated claim that humanity …Read more
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43Adam Smith and the character of virtueCambridge University Press. 2009.The problem : commerce and corruption -- Smith's defense of commercial society -- What is corruption? : political and psychological perspectives -- Smith on corruption : from the citizen to the human being -- The solution : moral philosophy -- Liberal individualism and virtue ethics -- Social science vs. moral philosophy -- Types of moral philosophy : natural jurisprudence vs. ethics -- Types of ethics : utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics -- Virtue ethics : modern, ancient, and Smithe…Read more
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41Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (5): 1001-1004. 2011.British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 19, Issue 5, Page 1001-1004, September 2011
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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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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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36Rethinking Kant’s Debts to RousseauArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 99 (4): 380-404. 2017.Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 4 Seiten: 380-404.
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36Thoreau 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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33Adam Smith on the ‘Natural Principles of Religion’Journal of Scottish Philosophy 13 (1): 37-53. 2015.Smith scholars have become interested of late in his thoughts on religion, and particularly the question of the degree to which Smith's understanding of religion was indebted to the influence of his close friend Hume. Until now this debate has largely focused on three elements of Smith's religious thought: his personal beliefs, his conception of natural religion, and his treatment of revealed religion. Yet largely unexplored has been one of the most important elements of Smith's thinking about r…Read more
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27Rousseau's three revolutionsEuropean Journal of Philosophy 29 (1): 105-119. 2020.European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 105-119, March 2021.
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21Practicing ppe: The case of Adam SmithSocial Philosophy and Policy 34 (1): 277-295. 2017.Abstract:Adam Smith has long been celebrated as a polymath, and his wide interests in and contributions to each of the discrete component fields of PPE have long been appreciated. Yet Smith deserves the attention of practitioners of PPE today not simply for his substantive insights, but for the ways in which his inquiries into these different fields were connected. Smith’s inquiry was distinguished by a synthetic approach to knowledge generation, and specifically to generating knowledge with app…Read more
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17Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better LifePrinceton University Press. 2019.Invaluable wisdom on living a good life from the founder of modern economics Adam Smith is best known today as the founder of modern economics, but he was also an uncommonly brilliant philosopher who was especially interested in the perennial question of how to live a good life. Our Great Purpose is a short and illuminating guide to Smith's incomparable wisdom on how to live well, written by one of today's leading Smith scholars. In this inspiring and entertaining book, Ryan Patrick Hanley descr…Read more
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16Reply to my criticsEuropean Journal of Political Theory 20 (3): 599-604. 2021.This reply to my five generous and insightful critics – Gianna Englert, David Williams, Alexandra Oprea, Geneviève Rousslière, and Brandon Turner – focuses on three key issues they raise: the relat...
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16"Smith on Virtue"In Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli & Craig Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, Oxford University Press. 2013.
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15Engaging with Rousseau: reaction and interpretation from the eighteenth century to the present, edited by Avi LifschitzIntellectual History Review 29 (2): 359-361. 2019.
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13Adam SmithIn Aaron Garrett & James Anthony Harris (eds.), Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion, Oxford University Press. 2015.This chapter provides an overview of the philosophy of Adam Smith by examining the place of history and the role of impartiality in his philosophy. A brief introduction to Smith and his writings is followed by discussions of impartiality and Smith’s engagement with the philosophical role of history and the historian. The section that follows focuses on Smith’s discussion of rights as providing a connection between his moral theory and history via the role of the impartial spectator. The chapter …Read more
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13The human good and the science of manHistory of European Ideas 48 (1): 23-32. 2022.ABSTRACT David Hume and Adam Smith are often regarded as preeminent contributors to the eighteenth-century Scottish ‘science of man.’ For our understanding of Hume’s and Smith’s contributions to this project, scholars today are especially indebted to Nicholas Phillipson, who influentially and persuasively demonstrated how the science of man that they developed sought to account for social progress as the result of man’s natural love of improvement in the face of conditions of indigence and want.…Read more
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13Bringing Religion Back In: Remarks on Gordon Graham for the Journal of Scottish PhilosophyJournal of Scottish Philosophy 17 (1): 6-12. 2019.
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13David Lay Williams, Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment. Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 30 (4): 309-311. 2010.
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11The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal by Martha C. NussbaumJournal of the History of Philosophy 58 (4): 829-830. 2020.Martha Nussbaum's latest book is a lucid and accessible study of a concept with clear contemporary relevance. In an age of resurgent nationalism, a study of the idea and ideals of cosmopolitanism is remarkably timely. But this is hardly a mere tract for the times; as its acknowledgments note, parts of the book date back to 2000. And ultimately, for all its timeliness, this is a scholarly rather than a popular study of "the long tradition of cosmopolitan political thought" and the ways this tradi…Read more
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11The Political Philosophy of FénelonOxford University Press. 2020."Fénelon is arguably the most neglected of all the major philosophers of early modernity. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet to now we have lacked a single interpretive monograph in English devoted specifically to his thought. This monograph aims to correct this by providing the first such book-length study. In focusing specifically on Fénelon's political thought, it has three primary aims. The first is to provide a reconstruction of…Read more
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9Moral and political writingsOxford University Press. 2020.Fénelon may be the most neglected of all the major early modern philosophers. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet today even specialists rarely engage his work directly. This problem is particularly acute in the Anglophone world, for while Fénelon's works have been published in several excellent modern French editions, only the smallest fraction of his vast and influential corpus has appeared in modern English translation. This volu…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 |