James H.P. Lewis

Philosophy

​I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham. My philosophical interests are generally connected to interpersonal relations, particularly the ways that people matter to one another. At the moment I am pursuing a project about the aesthetic dimension of interpersonal life. You can read a summary of that project here.

​A workshop organised as part of the project will be held in Birmingham in June 2022. All the information about the workshop, including the Call for Abstracts, can be found here.

I completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield 2015-2019. My dissertation was supervised by Robert Stern and Paul Faulkner, and is called 'The practical significance of the second-person relation'.
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With this theme of interpersonal relations at the centre, there are a range of areas of philosophy that I am interested in. They include metaethics (especially theories of practical reasoning, and moral epistemology), philosophy of love and friendship, the connections between ethics and aesthetics, and several historical figures, most prominently: Martin Buber, Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas and J.G. Fichte.

Email: jhplewis@gmail.com
Pronouns: he, him​

CV (click here)

Publications
4. Review of R. Jay Wallace 'The Moral Nexus', 2019. European Journal of Philosophy​, 27(4), pp. 1093-1096
3. 'Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable: What is the Normative Standing of the Other in Levinas?', 2019. Co-authored with Robert Stern. In M. Fagenblat ed. (forthcoming), Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Metaethics, Personal Identity, and the Moral Life, London: Routledge
2. 'The Practical Significance of the Second-Person Relation', 2019. PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield, White Rose eTheses Online
1. 'The Discretionary Normativity of Requests', 2018. Philosophers' Imprint, 18(20)

Some information about work of mine that is currently in progress can be found here.

As a Teaching Fellow at Birmingham last year (2019-20), I taught the following courses:
- LI Experience and Reason (Early Modern Philosophy)
- LI Feminist Philosophy
- LH Nietzsche
- LM Human Rights
My profile page on the University's website is here.