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What are we to make of the fact that nature has provided us with the power to be both critical and creative agents with regard to this world into which we are thrown? What follows politically from possessing these powers? What prevents us from exercising it? In teaching the history of political and social philosophy in the Social Foundations series, we find a variety of detailed responses to these questions in Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Confucius, Avicenna, Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant, and others. These philosophers demonstrate again and again that pursuing these questions connects us to our contemporary political life quite naturally: What is justice? What is a legitimate political regime? Who should rule? Who does rule? The great thinkers we read provide us different frames of interpretation and interrogration of social and political institutions that illuminate our own lives as citizens.
My own research interests focus on the ways in which we understand human action, the role of rationality and imagination in realizing our power in political life, both individually and collectively, and normative questions regarding concepts of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship.
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