Introduction
I went to school in the suburbs of Toulouse and then studied in Classes Préparatoires at the Lycées Saint-Sernin (Toulouse) and Henri IV (Paris). After admission to the École Normale Supérieure, I completed a BA in Economics and a Masters in Philosophy at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, as well as a Masters in Economics at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. I then moved to New York where I earned my PhD in Philosophy as part of a joint supervision agreement between The Graduate Center (City University of New York) and the École Normale Supérieure. Before joining Queen’s, I was in Montreal, working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at McGill University and the Center for Research in Ethics.
Teaching
I teach philosophy to undergraduates in all years at Queen’s. I teach the ‘General Philosophy’ and ‘Introduction to Logic’ first-year papers, and the option papers ‘Ethics’ and ‘Knowledge and Reality’.
Research
My research interests lie at the intersection of ethics, philosophy of action, and social philosophy. Informed by feminist philosophy, my work focuses on agency and responsibility, whether individual or shared, in our conflictual and unjust social world. I am currently engaged in two research projects. One focuses on complicity under conditions of structural injustice and oppression. The other examines the burden that our own agency might become when our social world forces us to do things we’d rather not do. A grounding assumption behind both projects is that our complicated social world significantly shapes our normative landscape and, accordingly, the way we exercise our agency when navigating this landscape as well as the responsibility we bear when navigating this landscape poorly.
Publications
“Shared Agency and Mutual Obligations: A Pluralist Account,” Forthcoming. The Philosophical Quarterly.
“Cooperation: With or Without Shared Intentions,” 2022. Ethics 132 (2): 414-444.
For a complete list of my publications, please visit www.jsalomone-sehr.com