Joseph Heath

Joseph Heath (born 1967) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he was formerly the director of the Centre for Ethics. He also teaches at the School of Public Policy and Governance.[1] He received his Bachelor of Arts from McGill University in 1990,[2] where his teachers included Charles Taylor, and his master of arts and doctor of philosophy (1995) degrees are from Northwestern University,[3] where he studied under Thomas A. McCarthy and Jürgen Habermas. He has published both academic and popular writings, including the bestselling The Rebel Sell. His philosophical work includes papers and books in political philosophy, business ethics, rational choice theory, action theory, and critical theory.

Heath is the recipient of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship (2012).[4] In 2013, Heath was named to the Royal Society of Canada.[5] His fourth popular book, Enlightenment 2.0, was published in 2014, and was the winner of the 2014 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.[6]

Ideas

The central claim of The Rebel Sell is that counter-cultural movements have failed, and that they all share a common fatal error in the way they understand society; thus counter-culture is not a threat to "the system". For example, it is suggested of Adbusters' Blackspot campaign that the shoe's existence proves that "no rational person could possibly believe that there is any tension between 'mainstream' and 'alternative' culture."

In the book Filthy Lucre, Joseph Heath criticizes the idea that tax-paying is inherently different from consumption, and argues that the idea of a tax freedom day is flawed:

It would make just as much sense to declare an annual "mortgage freedom day", in order to let mortgage owners know what day they "stop working for the bank and start working for themselves". ...But who cares? Homeowners are not really "working for the bank"; they're merely financing their own consumption. After all, they're the ones living in the house, not the bank manager.[7]

Publications

Popular books

Academic books

See also

References

External links