Thomas M. Scanlon

Thomas M. Scanlon

Thomas Michael ("Tim") Scanlon (born June 28, 1940 in Indianapolis , Indiana ) is an American moral philosopher . He is the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Politics in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University .

Scanlon is the son of a lawyer, through whom he acquired basic knowledge of general questions of constitutional law in his youth.

While studying philosophy at Princeton University , he focused on logic and the philosophy of mathematics . He wrote his thesis in 1962 with Paul Benacerraf . In 1963 and studied for a year at Oxford University , for which he received a Fulbright scholarship. Here he listened to Michael Dummett in particular, and for the first time dealt intensively with Immanuel Kant . He then moved to Harvard in 1963, where he met John Rawls on the one hand and received his doctorate from Burton Dreben with a thesis on proof theory in 1968.

As early as 1966 he had a teaching position at Princeton, where he was appointed professor in 1977. In 1984 he accepted a call to Harvard University, where he received the Alford Professorship in 1988 .

From around 1974 he shifted the focus of his work to questions of ethics and political philosophy . One of his most important research contributions is his new variant of contractualism . In it he stands in the tradition of John Rawls, Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau .

Scanlon is the associate editor of Philosophy and Public Affairs and became President of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) in 2002 . In 1993 he was a MacArthur Fellow and was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1997 he became a member of the British Academy . For 2016 he was awarded the Lauener Prize , and in 2018 Scanlon was elected to the American Philosophical Society .

Scanlon is married with two daughters and is the father-in-law of the philosopher and African explorer Tommie Shelby .

Works

• The Significance of Choice (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Oxford, May 1986) ( online ; PDF; 735 kB)
• The Diversity of Objections to Inequality , Kansas, 1997
• What We Owe to Each Other , Harvard University Press (1998) ( Review by Thomas Nagel )
• The Difficulty of Tolerance , Cambridge University Press (2003)
• Political Equality / Politische Gleichheit , Klartext (2005), ISBN 978-3-89861-432-0 (with further contributions by Rainer Forst, Herlinde Pauer-Studer , Gesine Schwan et al. Edited by Julian Nida-Rümelin and Wolfgang Thierse)
• Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame , Harvard University Press (2008) ( Review by Kevin Vallier, Value Inquiry (2010) 44: 561-565)
• Being Realistic About Reasons , Oxford University Press (2014)

Web links

• Literature by and about Thomas M. Scanlon in the catalog of the German National Library
• Scanlons website at the Department of Philosophy at Harvard
• Kant on the Cheap. An interview with Thomas Scanlon. ( Memento from June 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) 'The Philosophers' Magazine' 16 (2001) (PDF file; 97 kB)
• Thomas M. Scanlon: How I am not a Kantian . In Derek Parfit: On What Matters, Vol. 2, ed. Samuel Scheffler, 116-139. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
• Interview on Freedom of Expression, Tolerance, and Human Rights
• R. Jay Wallace: Scanlon's Contractualism. Ethics , Vol. 112, No. 3, April 2002.