John Davenport was born in Lancaster, PA, and his family lived in England
from spring 1976 to summer 1989. John attended high school at TASIS
England, studied Philosophy at Yale University from 1985 - 1989, and worked for
three years before beginning the doctoral program at Notre Dame. He
completed his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in 1998. Since
then, he has taught in the undergraduate and graduate programs at Fordham
University in New York City, where he has served as Associate Chair of
Philosophy and Associate Director of Environmental Studies for three-year terms
(fall 2005 - spring 2008). He has published widely on topics in free will and
responsibility, existentialism, virtue ethics, selfhood and motivation, theories
of justice, and philosophy of religion. With Anthony Rudd, John co-edited the
2001 collection, Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, which defends the relevance
of Kierkegaard's ideas for contemporary debates in moral psychology and virtue
ethics. His new book, Will as Commitment and Resolve (Fordham University
Press, June 2008), draws on ideas from the existential tradition to defend a
non-erosiac conception of willing as the capacity to set new ends based on the
recognition of values that transcend the agent's own good. On the basis of this
account, he hopes to offer an existential account of 'founded autonomy' that
depends on the alterity of values; this model resolves problems with
hierarchical accounts of personal autonomy and refines Harry Frankfurt's work on
caring and identity-defining commitments. In 2008, John also expects publication
of two news essays on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Concluding
Unscientific Postscript, two articles on global government, and a book
chapter on democratic limits to religion in the public sphere. John plans to
continue work on personal autonomy and topics in political philosophy in the
next few years.