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Timo will start a new research project on Competition and Competitiveness, funded by a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award, in October 2020.
Timo originally studied Politics and Hebrew at SOAS and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During this time, it became clear to him that he was most interested in the philosophical foundations of politics and society. In addition, a year-long module on Kant’s three Critiques led to an enduring interest in Kant’s critical philosophy and his German Idealist successors. After his first degree, Timo completed an MA in Social and Political Thought and a PhD in Philosophy at Sussex. There, he focused on German social and political philosophy, especially on Hegel and the Frankfurt School, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Adorno’s Critique of Kant’s Practical Philosophy.
After teaching for two years at UCD in Dublin and in Groningen (in the Netherlands), Timo came to Essex as a Lecturer in moral and political philosophy in 2011. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2016 and to Professor in 2019.
Timo’s research falls into three broad areas. First, he is interested in the moral status of capitalism and markets, and in understanding the concepts that we use to describe and evaluate capitalist societies and our role in them. Timo is particularly interested in competition and competitiveness, but he also has written on esteem (Jütten 2017) and solidarity (Jütten 2016).
Second, Timo has published a number of papers on Frankfurt School critical theory, which offer rigorous reconstructions of some central analytical concepts of this tradition, e.g. Habermas’ and Honneth’s conceptions of the market (Jütten 2013, 2015) and “reification” (Jütten 2011a, 2011b, 2010), and Adorno’s conceptions of hope, and freedom and determinism (Jütten 2019, 2012).
Finally, Timo is interested in some topics related to Feminism. He has published a paper on “Sexual Objectification” in the world-leading philosophy journal Ethics (Jütten 2016) and is currently completing a paper on prostitution, arguing for the specificity of “commodified” sex and the need to focus on the “demand side” in order to evaluate the moral status of prostitution.
Timo is a member of the Human Rights Centre and has contributed to two research projects on Human Rights. From 2015-20, he is a researcher on the ESRC-funded Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project, where he contributes to a workstream on consent. In 2014, he was co-investigator on an AHRC Follow on Fund for Impact and Engagement grant, Achieving UNCRPD Compliance, under the auspices of the Essex Autonomy Project (EAP).
Timo is interested in supervising PhD students in any of these areas.
