Owen Phillips

Bio:

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 (2015-2018). 

My dissertation is entitled “Public Reason Before Liberalism: The Political Morality of Thomas Hobbes” Its thesis is that a distinctive conception of public reason is the unifying idea of Hobbes’ arguments in ethical, political, and legal philosophy. The core of this conception is the rule of mutual justifiability that encapsulates Hobbes’ laws of nature: “Do not that to another, which thou thinkest unreasonable to be done by another to thyself.” (Leviathan 26.13, passim). Together these ‘laws’ mandate that one obey a legal order in which “the law is the public conscience” (Leviathan 29.7) and “the law of nature, and the civil law, contain each other, and are of equal extent” (Leviathan 26.8). My dissertation elaborates these perplexing claims. On my analysis, these describe a legal order in which the legislature is the determiner of public morality. Over time and through its laws, this body spells out the imperatives of this morality — that is to say, the determinate dictates regarding what one must do for others and must not do to others. Further, in this order only government agents have the authority to force compliance with these imperatives. This is the sole end for the sake of which these agents, and they alone, are permitted to coerce citizens; no one may coerce others without government authorization. The Hobbesian conviction here is that such a legal system is justifiable in a divided society because it appeals to practical commitments that all rational, reasoning individuals share, commitments that run deeper than their disagreements about how one should live and how the world should be. This system is an order of public reason, but it is not a liberal regime, in that respect for others as autonomous persons does not figure in its values. Nor is it a constitutional regime, in the sense of a legal order in which courts have the authority to strike down legislation on grounds of unconstitutionality. All this puts in a new light the place of public reason in the history of liberal democracy and clarifies the meaning and historical significance of Hobbes’ normative philosophy. 

My secondary project is about the philosophy of history – in particular, the methodology of intellectual history. My focus is the complex relationship between what a past thinker meant and what the implications of their arguments are. This research, influenced in part by pragmatist philosophy, informs the analysis of my dissertation.

Dissertation committee: Prof. Ian Shapiro (supervisor, chair); Prof. Bryan Garsten; Prof. Stephen Darwall.