Many of the courses I teach at the Institute are devoted to topics that are alive in contemporary political discussions, such as forgiveness, law and liberalism, feminist politics, difference, and deconstruction, but they also treat significant figures from the history of philosophy. Deconstruction and Politics begins by discerning the central concerns of political philosophy as expressed in ancient and modern texts, explores the roots of deconstructive philosophy in Hegel and Marx, and studies Derrida’s work on law, rights, violence, justice, democracy, hospitality and philosophy, concluding the course by reading several philosophers whose work is animated by this deconstructive tradition. My course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit explored the theme of Hegel’s phenomenology of identity—the dependence of identity on others, the experience of oneself as a self and as an other for others, the way in which coming to know oneself truly involves self-dispossession, and not self-possession. The Politics of Forgiveness explores the idea of forgiveness in Hegel, Arendt, Derrida, Ricoeur, and Jankélévitch—forgiveness not just as an ethical act, but as a social-ontological principle required by our fundamental separation as individuals from the good, the law, the others, and the communities about which we care. In Feminist Social Thought we study three topics: Simone de Beauvoir and her idea of an apprenticeship of freedom, the ethics and politics of care, and post-modern feminist criticisms and revaluations of law and legal protection. The Self and Its Others: Identity, Difference and Responsibilityexamines the construction of ethnic, racial, gendered, and post-colonial “difference,” exploring the notion that subjectivity is not merely given but produced through encounters with others, and thinking about what ethical and political responsibility might mean in this context. It begins by treating Kant, Hegel, and Levinas as each representative of one of the central principles by which justice and responsibility must be oriented—the autonomy of the self, the centrality of the community, and the indeterminate significance of the beyond. In Liberalism and Its Critics we explore various defences and critiques of liberal political theory, coming from communitarianism, philosophy of religion, critical theory, feminist philosophy, and post-structuralism. Body, Language, Power: The Question of the Human in 20^th-Century French Philosophy treats significant accounts of the nature of human beings in 20^th-century French continental philosophy. It begins by investigating the existential-phenomenological conceptions of human nature developed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and then takes up the development and transformation of this story in Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, who oppose to the humanist model of the well-formed and autonomous individual the model of persons as dispersed into networks of language and power. The Rational Individual and the Social Contract: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx explores the notion that society is based on a fundamental pact or a contract among autonomous individuals—a very old idea in political philosophy. The foundation of society in rational agreement has had an immeasurably significant impact on existing laws and political institutions; we look at the way this idea is developed and challenged by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx. Person, Family and Society is a course designed for the MWS program, and reflects on the nature of the social world, aiming at the development of an existentially and philosophically rich Christian sensitivity to the complexity of the social relationships that shape us and make claims on us. Challenging the common view that individuals are fully independent and self-made realities, we will look at the different kinds of communities that define us, in restrictive, enabling and conflicting ways: family, political society, religious community, and groups formed on the basis of other kinds of shared identities. The course includes readings from diverse philosophical, religious, literary, and social-scientific texts.

I have also participated in three of ICS’ interdisciplinary seminars (IDS), Ethics After Auschwitz; Truth in Contemporary Thought; and Way, Truth and Life: (Re)Visioning of Truth from the PreSocratics to Hegel, which have involved most or all of the senior and junior members. The first explores the work of Adorno and Levinas, two philosophers whose ethical thought was shaped by their experience in Germany during the Nazi regime. Truth in Contemporary Thought works with contemporary approaches to truth developed by Lambert Zuidervaart (another senior member at ICS), Heidegger, Horkheimer, Nietzsche, Foucault, and American Pragmatism, while the topic of Way, Truth and Life is truth as it has been conceived of and discussed in the history of philosophy. I have also taught and co-taught one of ICS’ required courses, Religion, Life and Society: Reformational Philosophy, on the work of first- and second-generation Reformational philosophers and of figures in mainstream analytic and continental philosophy.