Owen Phillips

I hail from Shelburne, Ontario, Canada. Before joining the department in the fall of 2018, I studied classics and anthropology at McMaster University (2009-2013; 2013-2015) and classics at Princeton University (2015-2017). In my Master’s thesis, I examined the Homeric system of ethical and political values with a view to elucidating the relation between the world of Homer and the world of the polis. My argument was that this system is founded on the concepts of portion, proportion, and proper distribution and, further, that this system shares much ground with the middling ideology of the polis. 

At present, my primary field of study is political theory/philosophy, and my general interests within this field include: theories of public reason; theories of the state; social ontology and its relations to normative and explanatory theorizing; political liberalism and pluralism; and the connections between the study of history and political philosophy. More broadly, I hope in my work to integrate historical perspective, philosophical reflection, and empirical social science.