James Harris
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
Phone: 01334 462432
Office: Room B11, Edgecliffe
Email: jah15@st-andrews.ac.uk
Early Modern Philosophy and Enlightenment Philosophy (especially Hume and Reid)
Profile
Thanks to a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, I am on leave for the 2009-10 academic year.
Current projects
- Editor of The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century.
- An intellectual biography of Hume, commissioned by Cambridge University Press.
- A series of papers on Hume's theory of justice and its early critics.
- Co-editor (with Knud Haakonssen) of Reid's Essays on the Active Powers of Man, for The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid.
- Editor a special issue of The Journal of Scottish Philosophy (to be published spring 2010) on the theme 'The Scottish Enlightenment and the Classics'.
- I am managing an Arts and Humanities Research Award from The Royal Society of Edinburgh, exploring the relevance of the Scottish philosophical tradition to political issues faced by present-day Scotland.
See also the research profile.
Selected publications
Recent publications
"Reid on Hume on Justice", in Sabine Roeser (ed.), Thomas Reid on Ethics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009: 204-222.
"Berkeley on the Experience of Freedom", in Genevieve Brykman, Laurent Jaffro, and Claire Schwartz (eds.), Berkeley's Alciphron: English Text and Essays in Interpretation, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2009: 341-50.
"The Epicurean in Hume", in Neven Leddy and Avi Lifchitz (eds.), Epicurus in the Enlightenment, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2009: 161-81.
"Of Hobbes and Hume", Philosophical Books 50 (2009): 38-46. [A review article about Paul Russell, The Riddle of Hume's Treatise (OUP, 2008).]
"'A compleat chain of reasoning': Hume's project in A Treatise of Human Nature, Books 1 and 2", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 109 (2009):129-48.
"Innateness in British philosophy, c. 1750 – 1820", Eighteenth-Century Thought 4 (2008): 203-227.
"Editing Hume's Treatise", Modern Intellectual History 5 (2008): 633-41. [A review article about Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary Norton, Oxford University Press, 2007.]
"Religion in Hutcheson's moral philosophy", Journal of the History of Philosophy 46 (2008): 205-22
"Reid and Religion", Eighteenth-Century Thought 3 (2007): 415-26 [A review article about Joseph Houston (ed.), Thomas Reid: Context, Influence, Significance, Dunedin Academic Press, 2004.]
Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, ed. James A Harris, 3 vols., Liberty Fund, 2007.
Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in 18th-Century British Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2005. (Paperback issued in 2007.)
Forthcoming publications
"The Early Reception of Hume's Theory of Justice", in Ruth Evelyn Savage (ed.), Philosophy and Religion in Enlightenment Britain, Oxford University Press.
"Hume", in John Skorupski (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Routledge.
"Liberty, necessity, and moral responsibility" in Aaron Garrett (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Routledge.
"Free Will", in Alan Bailey and Dan O'Brien (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Hume, Continuum.
Research interests
Most of my current research is in British eighteenth-century moral and political thought, with a particular focus on Hume.
I am willing to supervise research students on most topics in early modern philosophy.
Research students
Joachim Aufderheide, Ralf Bader and Alice Pinheiro-Walla
Availability
Though I am on leave for the duration of the 2009-10 academic year, I should be glad to answer enquiries from prospective research students and from undergraduates wishing to write dissertations on topics in early modern philosophy.
Additional information
A potted biography
I grew up on a farm near Winchester in Hampshire.
I studied English at Balliol College, Oxford, before doing an MA in philosophy at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. Later I returned to Oxford to do the B.Phil. in philosophy, and wrote my D.Phil under the supervision of Galen Strawson, on the free will problem in eighteenth-century British philosophy. I was a Gifford Research Fellow at Glasgow in 2000-1, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, from 2001 to 2004.
My non-academic interests include travel, film, music of many kinds, and hill walking.