Sem de Maagt

My research connects normative (political) ethics, questions about how we should act, and meta-ethics, questions about the status and justification of moral judgements. Against the grain of the dominant tendency in ethics to (over)specialize, I think that substantive ethical questions can only be answered once we know how moral judgements can be justified and vice versa, that meta-ethical questions cannot be separated from normative ethics.

I teach courses in ethics and political philosophy and I am the co-organizer of the PhD Spring School ‘Ethical Theory and Moral Practice’ for the Dutch Research School of Philosophy (see here for the 2018 edition). I am the co-supervisor of the PhD projects of Florian Bekkers and Dick Timmer.

Communicating philosophy to a broader audience is very important to me. I have co-authored a book on personal and practical identity published with Uitgeverij Boom (see my publications), I am a co-founder of a popular academic philosophy blog www.bijnaderinzien.org and I am the coordinator of the so-called ‘Ethische Annotaties’ of Utrecht University. I co-organize the monthly ‘Filosofisch Cafe‘ and the yearly ‘Utrechtse Dag van de Filosofie’.

In January 2017, I defended my PhD thesis ‘Constructing Morality: Transcendental Arguments in Ethics.’ My PhD thesis has been awarded with the Legatum Stolpianum, one of the oldest still existing scientific prizes in The Netherlands. I have received my Bachelor’s degree from University College Maastricht (2009, cum laude) and my Research Master’s degree in Philosophy from Utrecht University (2011, cum laude). During my PhD project, I spent a term at the Manchester Centre for Political Theory (2014) and another term at the London School of Economics (2015). I was a visiting researcher at the Faculty of Philosophy of Cambridge University for the autumn term of 2017.