Areas of interest
Contemporary political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion, and Islamic thought.
Education
- PhD, Comparative Religion and Ethics, Concordia University
Biography
Hossein Houshmand received a Ph.D. in comparative ethics from Concordia University. His research interests lie primarily in the area of contemporary political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion, and Islamic thought. In his lectures and writings on political philosophy, he tries to show that John Rawls’ Justice as Fairness and his theory of global normative order present a set of principles of justice applicable to domestic and global societies, which, if followed, would lead to the creation of a more just, stable, and peaceful world than ours is now. His current project focuses on the critical evaluation of the dominant Muslim intellectuals’ maximalist/radical approach to the enlightenment. He argues that the minimalist reading of Kantian enlightenment—according to which the moral duty of thinking for oneself does not entail replacing traditional ways of life with liberal individualism, but is intertwined with critical deliberation in the public sphere—leads to reasonable pluralism and mutual recognition as preconditions for an open and just society.