Dr. John J. Davenport

Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
Fordham University

Room 916C Lowenstein Building
212-636-7928
Email: Davenport@Fordham.Edu

Personal Pages

• For my academic vitae without links, see my online CV on the Philosophy Department's faculty list.
• For a list of courses I've taught at Fordham with links to course descriptions and other course-related materials, see my Academic Pages.  My courses cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from moral theory, moral psychology, free will and responsibility to political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and existentialism.
• For a list of all courses offered by our department at the Lincoln Center Campus since 1998 (with links to descriptions), see our Philosophy LC Courses Page
• For the Philosophy Department's program at the Lincoln Center campus, see Philosophy at FCLC & FCLS.
• For the Department's main page with links for all programs, see the Philosophy Department at Fordham University.
• For Environmental Studies at FCLC, please see Colin Cathcart in Architecture/Visual Arts (he is the Associate Director from fall 2008 on).  For environmental internships, graduate study, and local organization links, please see the ES Hotlinks Document. This page also contains links to information on the Environmental Studies minor.

• Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies at Lincoln Center: fall 2005 - spring 2008. Advising undergraduates in the Philosophy Major and Minor at the Lincoln Center campus, making course schedules, hosting department events, and maintaining our course webpages.
• Associate Director of Environmental Studies:  fall 2005 - spring 2008.
  Advising undergraduates in the Environmental Studies Minor at the Lincoln Center campus.
• Committees. Examples of my regular committee work during the academic year include:
  - Directing one dissertation in progress and two thesis proposals (2006 - 2008)
  - Committee member for several graduate student comprehensive oral exams (2008)
  - Modern Comprehensive Exam for the M.A. degree and doctoral candidacy (several years)
  - Dissertation reader for fifteen students receiving the Ph.D. at Fordham
  - Dissertation proposal defense committees
  - Departmental graduate admissions committee for M.A. and Ph.D. programs (two years)
  - Department Hiring Committee (fall 2005)
  - Department Lectures and Invited Speakers Committee (two years).
  - Department Executive Committee (three years)
  - FCLC College Council representative for Philosophy & Environmental Studies (2004-2008)
  - Strategic Planning Task Force on Central Administration (for Middle States review)
  - Senior Values Seminar subcommittee of the Arts and Sciences Council (2003 - present).

• Refereeing book manuscripts, book proposals, and essays for various publishers and philosophy journals.
• Vice-President of the Søren Kierkegaard Society of North America (spring 2007- fall 2008).
• APA Representative for the Søren Kierkegaard Society of North America ( fall 2003 - fall 2008).  In this capacity, I put out two calls for papers and referee submission for two group sessions at two different meetings of the American Philosophical Association per year.  See this link for the SK Society's current Call for Papers and Conference Annoucements.

Books

Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays in Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, co-edited with Anthony Rudd (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 2001). This book is a collection of published and new essays responding to MacIntyre’s critique of Kierkegaard and exploring the interfaces between Kierkegaard’s thought on moral agency and MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelian ethics. The volume includes responses by Alasdair MacIntyre and Philip Quinn. 

This book can still be ordered from the publisher in hardback for the paperback price.

Articles in Journals and Edited Volumes

(links to PFD versions: view for personal use only)

[For a manuscript version of  forthcoming papers, contact me]

"Religion in the Public Sphere: How Deliberative Democracy offers a Middle Road," forthcoming in Rethinking Secularization: Philosophy and the Prophecy of a Secular Age, ed. Gary Gabor and Herbert De Vriese (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008?).

"A Global Federalist Paper: Consolidation Arguments and Transnational Government," Journal of Value Inquiry (forthcoming, 2008).

"What Kierkegaardian Faith Adds to Alterity Ethics," forthcoming in A Conversation Between Neighbors: Emmanuel Levinas and Søren Kierkegaard in Dialogue, ed. J. Aaron Simmons and David Wood (forthcoming, Indiana University Press, 2008).

"Faith as Eschatological Trust in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling," forthcoming in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard, ed. Edward Mooney (Indiana University Press, July 2008).

"Deontology and Alan Donagan’s Problem of Exception-Rules," Analysis 55 no.4 (October, 1995), 261-70.
 

Review Essays

Review of Religion in the Liberal Polity, ed. Terence Cuneo, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (online since summer 2005 at http://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews.cfm).

Review Essay on Tradition(s), by Stephen Watson, in The Owl of Minerva: Journal of the Hegel Society of America (December 2000): 65-82.
 

Short Reviews

Review of Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, by Chris Sciabarra, in Canadian Philosophical Reviews 16 no.2 (April, 1996).

Conference Papers & Lectures

See my online CV for a complete list of refereed conference presentations, invited lectures, and replies.  Copies of any of these papers and commentaries are available on request.

Public Talks in powerpoint

(can be presented on request)

Just War, Humanitarian Intervention, and a Federation of Democracies
 

Working  Projects in draft form

Identification and Bad Faith: Combining Frankfurtian and Sartrean Insights

Democracy Beyond Nationalism: Transnational Identity and Universalism in the Political Philosophy of Jürgen Habermas

A Heideggerian Critique of Hans Blumenberg's Work on Myth

An Existentialist Critique of Molinism

The Phenomenological Critique of Representationalism: Husserl's and Heidegger's Transcendental Arguments for a Qualified Realism

An Interpretation of Kant's "Refutation of Idealism"

Rawls's Priority of Liberty and Difference Principles: A Deliberative-Democratic Critique

A Philosophical Critique of Psychological Personality-Type Theories: Myers-Briggs, Esyenck, and Jung

Revelation-Excluding Public Reason vs Radical Inclusivism: A Deliberative-Democratic Response to Quinn and Wolterstorff

Habermas's Democratic Balance Between Rights and Popular Sovereignty: A Response to Charles Larmore
 

Informal papers

(with no planned publication)

The Matter of Britain: The Mythological and Philosophical Significance of the British Legends (manuscript used as a gift to friends and to supplement a course packet on Tolkien).

My scholarly goals divide into three main areas, which all involve putting existentialism back on the map as a viable position in both analytic and continental philosophy. 

(1) In the areas of moral psychology and moral theory, I hope to show that  an existential approach (indebted to Kierkegaard and Heidegger)

• embodies the best account of moral freedom (the free will required for moral responsibility), over any alternative account.
• leads an understanding of the will and moral psychology superior to those found in the main neo-Humean, neo-Kantian, and neo-Aristotelian conceptions of agency today.
• gives us a philosophical anthropology that avoids the reductionism of most contemporary philosophy of mind, the thin rationalist conceptions of personhood in neo-Kantian accounts, the reduction of personhood to a human kind-essence in Aristotelian approaches, and finally the abandonment of the individual self in most postmodern accounts.
• implies a narrative and hierarchical account of autonomy that recognizes the essential significance of interpersonal relations in the determination of our identity, but without leveling off irreducibly intrasubjective relations that are just as crucial.
• provides the basis for an agapeistic virtue ethics that is universalist in scope but not formalist in content, avoiding the errors both of Kantian formalism and the contemporary tendency in continental ethics to reject universals of any sort in favor of the singular.
• gives us a solid metaphysical foundation for what is right in the discourse ethics and the deliberative approach to normative democratic theories of social justice, while making up for their inadequacies.
• furnishes the right perspective from which to address a myriad of issues in bioethics.

In this way I hope to map out a systematic new alternative in moral philosophy, which has its sources and inspirations in the classical texts of 19th and 20th century existentialist and personalist literature (outside of the Nietzschian tradition).

(2) My interests in political philosophy really form a distinct subset of scholarly goals, including:

• Defending the superiority of Habermas's deliberative conception of democratic legitimacy based on a comprehensive conception of communicative action and reason over Rawls's political liberalism.  In particular, I argue that Habermas's approach better unified rights with a conception of popular sovereignty that avoids tyranny of the majority, and provides a way to interpret the scope of rights in terms of their purposes.
• Arguing that this conception of democracy derived from Habermas and the classical American republication tradition (from the Federalists and Whigs to Lincoln) is incompatible with theocracy, and excludes from political discourse all claims based solely on alleged revelation beyond natural reason.
• Developing a systematic conception of 'federalist'-style justifications for creating higher levels of government with primary sovereignty over certain parts of society.  In particular, I hope to show that a new federation of the world's leading democracies should take over the role of the U.N. Security Council to provide international law with a fully legitimate basis in the 21st century.
• Developing a positive conception of distributive justice in terms of an endowment model with emphasis on indebtedness to the past as a refutation of political libertarianism.
• Using this endowment model of distributive justice, combined with a moderate/sane environmental ethics that recognizes a hierarchy of different intrinsic values in nature (with a distinct place for the value of individual moral agents) to show that justice requires limits on the global free market for the sake of environmental preservation.
• Defending a modified retributivist conception of criminal justice (emphasizing the communication of public condemnation along with opportunities for making restitution) over utilitarian theories of just punishment, which have produced a system of highly disproportionate sentences.

(3) Finally, I have a set of interests in Philosophy of Religion that are more closely tied to my scholarly goals in philosophical anthropology and normative theory.  These include:

• Topics in comparative religion such as the sacred and profane in cosmogonic myth.
• Eschatology as the element that distinguishes the divine in revealed religion and mythology from the 'God of Philosophers,' or the realm of ethical and metaphysical principles.
• Critiquing secularist theories of the origin of religion: purported naturalistic explanations of the idea of the divine in mythography from Freud to Blumenberg all fail to show that basic religious concepts and experiences can be caused by other natural psychological processes.
• Developing a new theistic answer to the problem of natural evil (which I call the 'Donaldsonian natural law theodicy').
• The interface between contemporary theories of cosmology, related metaphysical issues (such as the nature of time and natural law) and theistic explanations of the origin of the universe.

Education

TASIS England: High School Diploma, June 1985. Graduate Valedictorian.

Selected Editorials

Also see my blog

The Democratic Federation

Personal Background

List of Philosophy-Related Courses Taken 
 

Photo Pages