Dr. David Thunder speaks about the Storm, Is It Too Late to Save Democracy?
Dr. David Thunder,
Researcher & Lecturer
Institute for Culture and Society
(Religion and Civil Society Project)
University of Navarra,
31009 Pamplona, Spain.
www.davidthunder.com
email: dthunder at unav dot es
twitter: @davidjthunder
Welcome to my homepage! By profession I am a university lecturer and researcher in moral, political, and social philosophy. I grew up in Ireland where I studied philosophy and French for my BA and philosophy for my MA (both at University College Dublin), followed by a couple of years of work in nonprofit administration. I then moved to the United States to pursue a Ph.D in political science (University of Notre Dame). My doctoral dissertation is a critique of John Rawls's ideal of public reason, focusing in particular on the moral restrictions it places on public discourse; and an attempt to elaborate a virtue-ethical ideal of public reason that gives more scope to self-expression and ethical integrity in the public square. It can be accessed here.
After earning my Ph.D., I undertook further research and teaching, including a year of teaching at Bucknell, a year as postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University's Politics Department (James Madison Program), and three years of teaching at Villanova, outside Philadelphia. In September 2012 I was appointed Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, an interdisciplinary humanities and social science research centre founded in 2010 at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. Although my primary appointment is in the institute, I also lecture in the philosophy department and in the Centro de Empresa y Humanismo (Center for Business and Humanism). I am affiliated to the Religion and Civil Society Project.
In my research, I endeavour to reach a deeper understanding of the lived experience of persons who seek to live meaningful and worthy lives in community with others, and to grasp the social and institutional conditions under which this aspiration can be satisfied. Because of the complexity and breadth of these questions, my research necessarily straddles the fields of ethics, political philosophy, social theory, and law. Specific issues I have taken up in my writings include prospects for ethical coherence in public roles, our responsibilities toward the distant needy, the moral justification of human rights, the limits of impartiality as a guide to moral judgment, the ethics of financial trading, and the challenge of building community in an individualistic culture.
The content of my research so far has been shaped by a desire to better understand the meaning of political order from the standpoint of a responsible person who, as Harry Frankfurt would put it, "takes himself/herself seriously." Two questions have been of special interest to me: first, how can individual persons find the knowledge and motivation to contribute to the public life of their communities in a responsible and effective manner; and second, how can individual persons remain faithful to their own ethical commitments as they exercise their social and civic roles? This first phase of my research career gave rise to several journal articles and a book-length study entitled Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Most recently, I have published an edited volume, The Ethics of Citizenship in the 21st Century (Springer, 2017).