Cristina Lafont

Cristina Lafont
Born Valencia, Comunidad Valenciana, Spain
School
Institutions Northwestern University
Main interests

Cristina Lafont is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University.[1] Her current research focuses on normative questions in political philosophy concerning democracy and citizen participation, global governance, human rights, religion and politics. She works in a framework of deliberative democratic theory, where she defends a participatory construal of the democratic ideal against proposals to insulate political decision making from the influence of the citizenry.[2] This conception requires the citizens to respect the priority of public reason over religious or otherwise comprehensive views in their political deliberations in the public sphere.[3] At the level of global governance, she argues against the current state-centric understanding of human rights obligations because of the protection gaps it leaves open. Instead, she advocates a more ambitious construal of the responsibility to protect (R2P) human rights, which she interprets as a provisional duty of the international community as a whole until appropriate institutions are in place to close these gaps.[4][5] Lafont is also widely known for her work in Critical Theory,[6] especially for her critical elaboration of themes in the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas.[7][8] Cristina Lafont’s earlier philosophical work in the philosophy of language of Heidegger’s hermeneutics issues in her identification of a specific form of “linguistic turn” (centered on the “world-disclosing” function of conceptual structures in language) in post-Kantian German philosophy between Hamann and Habermas.[9] The upshot is that the systematic idealistic and constructivist tendency of this tradition is owed to a specific set of assumptions in its linguistic philosophy. In this work, she applies select tools from the theory of meaning developed in analytic philosophy of language[10] to foundational issues from German Continental philosophy. This approach enables fruitful and precise comparisons between, e.g., Robert Brandom’s inferentialist framework and hermeneutics or Habermas’ theory of communicative action. One central tenet of Lafont’s philosophical work that runs throughout these otherwise very different works is her interest in the necessary conditions for normative rational criticism and reasoned change on this basis. This motivates her insistence on the need for realist correctives of the idealism characteristic of German philosophy of language as much as it is behind her critical examination of principles of public reason in deliberative democracy and as it drives her research in human rights (as not merely constructed by but a source of the moral quality of legal and political systems).

Education, major professorships and Honors

Lafont graduated ‘cum laude’ with a Licenciatura in philosophy from the Universidad de Valencia in 1987. From there, she moved to Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt (Main), where she obtained her PhD in philosophy (Dr. phil.) ‘summa cum laude’ in 1992 under the supervision of Jürgen Habermas. At the same university, she was awarded the Habilitation in the year 2000. Cristina Lafont has held numerous positions as a distinguished lecturer or visiting professor in the English-speaking, Spanish-speaking and German-speaking academic world. Thus, she was Visiting professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Mexico (Mexico), Universidad Carlos III Madrid (Spain), Universidad de Oviedo (Spain), Lehrbeauftragte at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt. In 2008, she held a Secularity and Value Lecture at the London School of Economics,[11] in 2009 the García Máynez Lectures at the Universidad Autónoma de Mexico (Ciudad de Mexico, D.F.), in 2011 she held the Spinoza chair at the University of Amsterdam,[12] and in 2012-13, she was a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study[13]

Selected works

References

  1. ↑ Cristina Lafont's personal page at Northwestern University's Department of Philosophy
  2. ↑ C. Lafont, “Deliberation, Participation, and Democratic Legitimacy: Should Deliberative Mini-publics Shape Public Policy?”
  3. ↑ C. Lafont, "Religion and the Public Sphere"
  4. ↑ C. Lafont, "Sovereignty and the International Protection of Human rights"
  5. ↑ C. Lafont, Global Governance and Human Rights
  6. ↑ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Critical Theory
  7. ↑ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Jürgen Habermas
  8. ↑ Habermas Handbuch (2013), co-ed. with Hauke Brunkhorst and Regina Kreide
  9. ↑ Author meets Critics issue of Inquiry on 'Heidegger, Language and World Disclosure', with Precis and Replies by Cristina Lafont
  10. ↑ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Analytic Philosophy of Language
  11. ↑ LSE Secularity and Value Lectures
  12. ↑ Amsterdam University, list of Spinoza chairs
  13. ↑ Fellow-profile for Cristina Lafont at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
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