What are we to make of the fact that nature has provided us with the power to be both critical and creative agents with regard to this world into which we are thrown? What follows politically from possessing these powers? What prevents us from exercising them? In teaching the history of political and social philosophy in the Global Works and Society Sequence, we find a variety of detailed responses to these questions in Plato, Lao Tzu, Averroes, Hobbes, Cavendish, Kant, Hegel, Fanon, Cusicanqui, and others. These philosophers demonstrate again and again that pursuing these questions connects us to our contemporary political life quite naturally: What is justice? What is a legitimate political regime? Who should rule? Who does rule? The great thinkers we read provide us different frames of interpretation and interrogation that illuminate the workings of the social and political institutions that shape our lives as citizens. My own research interests focus on the ways in which we understand human action, the role of rationality and imagination in realizing our power in political life, both individually and collectively, and normative questions regarding concepts of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship.
Dr. Hogan spent the 2018–19 academic year as a research fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.