T. M. Scanlon

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Thomas Michael ("Tim") Scanlon (1940 - ) is the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in Harvard University's Department of Philosophy. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard under Burton Dreben, studied for a year at Oxford University on a Fulbright Scholarship, and taught for many years at Princeton University. His early work was in proof theory, but he soon made his name in moral and political philosophy, where he developed a version of contractualism in the line of John Rawls, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Scanlon has also published important work on freedom of speech, foundations of contract law, and human rights.

Scanlon is the father-in-law of philosopher and scholar of African studies Tommie Shelby.

[edit] Selected works

• What We Owe to Each Other, Harvard University Press (1998)
• The Difficulty of Tolerance, Cambridge University Press (2003)

[edit] External links

• The Department of Philosophy at Harvard
• Kant on the Cheap. An Interview with Thomas Scanlon. 'The Philosophers' Magazine' 16 (2001)