Jon Garthoff, assistant professor of philosophy, was a co-organizer of last spring’s “Animals, Ethics and Law” symposium, and he has been invited to give, in no small measure as a response to his contributions to the spring symposium here, a paper in South Africa on the moral status of animals. Relatedly, he also delivered a paper at the recent meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Atlanta on (and decomposing) the idea of legal personhood.
Garthoff’s main work is primarily in moral and political philosophy, and he is especially interested in what the Kantian tradition contributes to these areas of thought. More specifically he is interested in how a theory of moral obligation can cohere with a plausible theory of value and in how the pursuit of this project helps to solve problems in the theories of justice and legitimacy.
His Ph.D. is from UCLA, and he did his undergraduate work at Princeton. Before joining the Philosophy Department in 2011 he was an assistant professor at Northwestern University and a visiting assistant professor at the University of Chicago.