Politics, International Relations & Philosophy

BSc and BA (Bucharest); MA and PhD (Manchester)

I joined the Philosophy Programme in SPIRE in August 2007, after having taught and researched for several years at Manchester University (in Philosophy and the Centre for Political Theory).

Main areas of research interest:

• Kantian Philosophy (Kant's philosophy, all areas, and contemporary Kantians)
• Normativity (in ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy and epistemology)
• Metaphysics (especially personal identity, space and time)
• Justice and Desert (debates between egalitarians, desert theorists, need theorists and supporters of other accounts of justice)
• Phenomenology (most phenomenologists, starting with Brentano and Husserl, continuing with, among many others, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and until Levinas and Ricoeur)

I welcome inquiries about potential supervision of postgraduate research in any of these areas. For information on topics I currently supervise, please click here.

2012/13 Academic Session:

Foundation Year:

• Critical Thinking

Year 1:

• How to Think

Year 2:

• Pursuit of the Good
• Philosophy of Religion

Year 3:

• Philosophy of Art

Postgraduate:

• Power, Knowledge and the World (team-taught)
• Metaphilosophy (team-taught)
• Foundations of Human Rights (team-taught)
• Philosophy of Social Science (team-taught)

Books

Monograph

• Kant and Sartre: Rediscovering Critical Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan 2011)

"Starting from an original comparative methodology this first book-length comparative study challenges the standard view of the relationship between Kant's and Sartre's ethical theories. While their works in moral philosophy are usually contrasted, this book makes a case for regarding Kant as one of Sartre's most important predecessors and for reading Sartre's ethical writings as offering a practical philosophy which is closer to Kant than more recent Kantian moral theories are. On the basis of the similarities between their practical philosophies, the author argues that several aspects of Kant's critical ethics, which have been overlooked or explicitly avoided by contemporary Kantians, can be retrieved and are essential for an appropriate approach to currently urgent normative problems, such as the problem of the justification of ethical and political norms in conditions of pluralism". (Palgrave Press Release)

A “clear, forcefully argued work” of “considerable originality… the first study to attempt to show flaws in Sartre's understanding of Kant, which will be of great interest – and possibly controversy – among Sartre scholars". (Anonymous Reviewer from the Press)

The book was launched by the Forum for European Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, the University of Oxford, in May 2012. Click here to listen to the event.

Edited Collections

• Kant on Practical Justification: Interpretive Essays (co-edited with Mark Timmons, Oxford University Press - forthcoming 2013)

This volume of new essays provides a comprehensive and structured examination of Kantian accounts of practical justification. This examination serves as a starting point for a focused investigation of the Kantian approach to justification in practical disciplines (ethics, legal and political philosophy or philosophy of religion). The recent growth of literature on this subject is not surprising given that Kant's approach seems so promising: he claims to be able to justify unconditional normative claims without recourse to assumptions, views or doctrines, which are not in their turn justifiable. Within the context of modern pluralism, this is exactly what the field needs: an approach which can demonstrably show why certain normative claims are valid, and why the grounds of these claims are valid in their turn, and why the freedom to question them should not be stifled. Although this has been a growth area in philosophy, no systematic and sustained study of the topic of practical justification in Kantian philosophy has been undertaken so far. With fourteen original chapters and an introduction from leading researchers in the field, this volume addresses this neglected topic. The starting point is the still-dominant view that a successful account of justification of normative claims has to be non-metaphysical. The essays engage with this dominant view and pursue further implications in ethics, legal and political philosophy, as well as philosophy of religion. Throughout the essays, the contributors bring into contact with contemporary debates key interpretive questions about Kant's views on practical justification. (OUP Presentation)

• Politics and Metaphysics in Kant (co-edited with Sami Pihlstrom and Howard Williams, University of Wales Press, 2011)

"The past three decades have witnessed the emergence, at the forefront of political thought, of several Kantian theories. Both the critical reaction to consequentialism inspired by Rawlsian constructivism and the universalism of more recent theories informed by Habermasian discourse ethics trace their main sources of inspiration back to Kant's writings. Yet much of what is Kantian in contemporary theory is formulated with more or less strict caveats concerning Kant's metaphysics. These range from radical claims that theories of justice must be political, not metaphysical, to more cautious calls for replacing Kant's metaphysics with a more modest ontology, for instance, one informed by the relatively recent linguistic turn in philosophy. The volume will consist of thirteen state-of-the-art essays which explore the relationship between politics and metaphysics in Kant and Kantian political philosophy. All essays will be published for the first time in this volume and will be preceded by an Introduction from the editors. Given the current legitimation crisis of modern liberal democracies, the purpose of the collection as a whole is to revisit the question concerning the role of metaphysics in moral and political philosophy and to suggest new perspectives on the question of legitimation." (UW Press Release)

"This excellent volume is a welcome and quite distinctive addition to political philosophy generally as well as to our understanding of Kant and Kantian approaches to political problems. The book's thirteen essays, including a substantive editors' introduction, collectively serve to probe the importance of metaphysics for grounding political principles and applying those principles to concrete political and moral issues in the contemporary context of pluralism and diversity". (Mark Timmons, University of Arizona)

For further information (for instance, access to some papers), go to:

http://keele.academia.edu/SorinBaiasu (under construction)

Current:

• PhD:
  
  • Philippe Blenkiron: Originality, Normativity and Liberty
  • Jonathan Head: Kant's Philosophy of Hope and Salvation
  • Lavinia Udrea: Cultivating Moral Responsibility Towards the Environment
• MPhil:
  
  • Robert Eggett: Phenomenology and Practical Normativity

Completed:

• MRes:
  
  • Arran Goodfellow: Metaphysical Assumptions of Natural Law