Dr Thomas Besch

Room N592, Quadrangle A14
+612 9351 2216

Thomas M. Besch did his PhD at the University of Oxford. He mainly works in the area of contemporary political and moral philosophy, with special interest in the issue of diversity and discursive inclusion, as well as the phenomenology, epistemology and the morality of disagreement about the grounds, standards and the scope of practical reasoning, justification, reasonableness and justice. Before he came to Sydney, he taught Logic at Oxford and Social and Political Philosophy in Ankara.

Publications

Articles

• “Factualism, Normativism, and the Bounds of Normativity”. Forthcoming in Dialogue 50/2 (2011).
  Copy available here.
• “Kantian Constructivism, the Issue of Scope, and Perfectionism: O’Neill on Ethical Standing”, in European Journal of Philosophy 19/1 (2011), pp. 1–20.
  Copy available here.
• “Diversity and the Limits of Liberal Toleration”, in Duncan Ivison (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Multiculturalism (London: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 75-94.
  Copy available here.
• “Constructing Practical Reason: O’Neill on the Grounds of Kantian Constructivism”, in The Journal of Value Inquiry 42/1 (2008), pp. 55–76.
  Copy available here
• “On Political Legitimacy, Reasonableness, and Perfectionism”. Submitted for publication.
  Copy available here.
• “Reflections on the Foundations of Human Rights”. Submitted for publication.
  Copy available here.

Book

• Über John Rawls’ politischen Liberalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1998).

Dissertation

• On Practical Constructivism and Reasonableness. (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2004).
  Copy available here.

Recent presentation papers

• A Short Question about Justification. Symposium: Encounter with Thomas Pogge, Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, The University of Sydney (2012).
• Discursive Inclusion and the Problem of Hermeticality. Faculty Presentation, Faculty of Social Sciences, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul (2011).
• On Political Legitimacy, Reasonableness, and Perfectionism. GALA-seminar, The Kadish Center for Morality, Law and Public Affairs, The University of California at Berkeley (2010).
• Rawls, Legitimacy, Reasonableness. Talk at the Department of Philosophy, Boğazici University, Istanbul (2010).
• Rawls, Legitimacy, Reasonableness. SHAPE Research Group Meeting, Department of Philosophy, The University of Sydney (2010).
• Political Justification and the Problem of Hermeticality. Symposium The Normativity of Critique, Department of Philosophy, The University of Sydney (2010).
• On How (not) to Be a Political Liberal. Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, The University of New South Wales, Sydney (2010).
• Toleration and the Paradox of Delineation. Annual Conference of the International Society for Justice Research, Flinders University, Adelaide (2008).
• Kantian Constructivism and Perfectionism. Talk at the Department of Philosophy, The University of Sydney (2008).
• Tolerating Tolerantly. Talk at the Department of Philosophy, Boğazici University (2008).

Teaching

• Society (PHIL1013)
• Democratic Theory (PHIL2634)
• Public Reason
• On Toleration
• Cosmopolitanism and Community
• Rawls