Thomas Michael ("Tim") Scanlon (born 1940) is the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in Harvard University's Department of Philosophy. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard under Burton Dreben, studied for a year at Oxford University on a Fulbright Scholarship, and taught for many years at Princeton University, where he was an undergraduate student. His early work was in proof theory, but he soon made his name in ethics and political philosophy, where he developed a version of contractualism in the line of John Rawls, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Scanlon has also published important work on freedom of speech, equality, tolerance, foundations of contract law, and human rights.

Scanlon is the father-in-law of philosopher and scholar of African American studies Tommie Shelby.

[edit] Selected works

• What We Owe to Each Other, Harvard University Press (1998)
• The Difficulty of Tolerance, Cambridge University Press (2003)
• Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame, Harvard University Press (2008)

[edit] Interviews with Scanlon

• 'The Kingdom of Ends on the Cheap' in in Alex Voorhoeve Conversations on Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-921537-9

[edit] External links

• The Department of Philosophy at Harvard

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