Members

Associate Professor Kjersti Fjørtoft is the head of the Department of Philosophy and head  of the project awarded in 2010 by the Norwegian Council, "Justice in Conflict". She wrote her PhD on The relationship between the political and non-political in Ralws’ political liberalism. Fjørtoft is particularly interested in political liberalism, theories of justice, justice and gender, human rights, global justice and question concerning democracy and equality. She has published articles on political liberalism, the capabilities approach, recognition and redistribution and the relationship between gender, ethic of care and ethic of justice. Cristin / CV (In Norwegian)

Jan Harald Alnes is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy. Alnes' research interests focuses on normative philosophy, in particular, on the ethical and political writings of John Stuart Mill and John Rawls. Currently, he is engaged in two projects: (1) The investigation of the interconnections between Mill’s versions of utilitarianism, liberalism and Art of Life (as presented in the final Chapter of A System of Logic), respectively. (2) The study of civic education in light of political liberalism. Cristin

Erik Christensen was appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tromsø in 2010. He received his Ph.D. from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and his research was funded by the Research Council of Norway and the Program for Functional Genomics. Christensen has been a Visiting Researcher at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University (2008). He has held a fellowship in Ancient Greek Philosophy from the Research Council of Norway (2000), and a Greek Government Scholarship (1999-2000). Christensen has also been a visiting researcher at the Norwegian Institute at Athens (1999-2000). Christensen's research interests focuses on political philosophy, ethical theory, bioethics, and medical ethics. He is currently working on multiculturalism, liberalism, and gender; virtue ethics (Aristotelian and contemporary virtue ethics) and conceptions of the good life; the duty to participate in biobank research (human genetic databases); bioethics committees, and ethical experts. Christensen has published on political philosophy, bioethics, and virtue ethics in journals like The Monist, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy.

Recent publications includes "Revisiting multiculturalism and its critics" published in The Monist (2012), and "The re-emergence of the liberal-communitarian debate in bioethics: exercising self-determination and participation in biomedical research" published in The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy (2012). For other publications and ongoing research projects, please visit the web site: Cristin, https://sites.google.com/site/politicalphilosophychristensen, and: http://uit.academia.edu/ErikChristensen.

Roar Anfinsen is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Tromsø. Anfinsen’s research interests focuses on ethics, ancient and modern, and on political philosophy. He is currently engaged in a metaethical project concentrating on the relation between moral sanctions, moral obligation, moral motivation and justification. A central issue is the role and eventually the value of reactive emotions in morality. Cristin

Øyvind Stokke (born 1967) is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tromsø. He earned his Ph.d. in 2008 on a dissertation on Habermas’ discourse-theory of law and democracy. A reconstruction of the discourse-theory of law within the frame of the critical social theory of Habermas’ opus magnum The theory of communicative action opens up a rich theoretical framework for both analyses and critique of competing conceptions of European political modernity. Contradictory potentials within European Union law-making are analysed, and tensions between political membership and market citizenship within Case law from the European Court of Justice on European social security are documented.

Stokke was a Ph.d. research fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tromsø between 2002 and 2008. The research was funded by the Norwegian Research Council and the Faculty of the social sciences. In 2004 Stokke was a visiting ph.d. fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, advised by professor Peter Wagner (Jan-July). In 1996 Stokke earned his MA on a thesis on Émile Durkheims conception of social science. He has been teaching philosophy at the Universities of Bergen and the University of Tromsø since 1996.

Stokke’s research interests focus on political philosophy and political theory; European political modernity; democratic theory; Jürgen Habermas' discourse theory and discourse ethics; global democracy and global governance; human rights; migration and membership; capitalism and the commons. Cristin

Tor Ivar Hanstad is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tromsø and the temporary head of the PDJ Research Group. Hanstad’s main research interests are political philosophy and ethics. Under the heading of political philosophy his main interests are political realism, liberalism, international politics, security politics and the use of war and warfare in international relations. In ethics the main interest is on the ethics of war. Hanstad is also working on the approach of nihilism in both political philosophy and ethics. He is currently writing the dissertation: Taking Warfare out of War: On Nihilism and Western Warfare after the Cold War. Cristin

Annamari Vitikainen is a postdoctoral researcher in political philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Tromsø. She defended her doctoral thesis “Limits of Liberal Multiculturalism” at the University of Helsinki 2013. Vitikainen has also worked as a research associate at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Bremen (2011-2012) and as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Australian National University (2008). Vitikainen’s research interests include liberalism, multiculturalism, theories of justice (incl. social, global, and gender justice), cosmopolitanism, nationalism, philosophy of law, and feminism. Recent publications include “Liberal Multiculturalism, Group Membership, and Distribution of Cultural Policies”, Ethnicities 9:1 (2009) and “Exit, Identity, and Membership”, in: Borchers and Vitikainen (eds.): On Exit: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the right of exit in liberal multicultural societies. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter (2012).

Jonas Jakobsen is a Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Tromsø, Norway, and the subeditor of the Norwegian Journal of Philosophy [Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift]. Jakobsen’s research interests are social and political philosophy, multiculturalism, secularism and Islamic political thinking. Recent publications include “Religion and (Mis)recognition: Axel Honneth and the Danish Cartoon Affair” in Jonas Jakobsen and Odin Lysaker (eds.): Recognition and Social Democracy: Axel Honneth in the Nordic Welfare States (Leiden: Brill, 2013 (forthcoming)) and “Education, Recognition and the Sami People of Norway” in Christian Ydesen and Heike Niedrig:  Writing Histories of Postcolonial Education (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011). He is writing the dissertation: Islamophobia or Critique of Religion? A Discussion of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of Deliberative Democracy and its Relevance for the Debate on legitimate versus illegitimate Critique of Islam. Cristin

Research Fellow Melina Duarte was born in 1983 in Brazil. In February 2007 she received a BA in Philosophy from Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. She wrote a monograph on Rights: the expression of freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right under supervision of Prof. PhD at Sorbonne University, Denis Rosenfield, and she received the highest score. In the semester 2007/2008 she followed courses in German on Philosophy of Law and Political Philosophy as a guest student at Faculty of Philosophy at University of Zürich. In 2008 she was selected on the first place to follow a Master course from Europhilosophie Program. In 2010 she earned a Master degree in “German and French Philosophy in the European Context” in three prestigious universities: at Toulouse le Mirail University in France, at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and at Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. At this last university she wrote a master thesis in German on Hegel’s Theory of Crime and Punishment under supervision of Prof. PhD Günter Zöller and she received the highest score. In  2011 she was selected on the first place to follow a PhD Program in Norway. Currently she is PhD Candidate at the Department of Philosophy at University of Tromsø in Norway and her research is about Global Justice. Melina has scientific papers in Portuguese and in French published in national and international Journals and a book in German published online by Europhilosophie Éditions. She is part of the Editorial Board of the Journal Acta Universitatis Carolinae from the University Charles of Prague for its special issue called Interpretationes and she regularly publishes articles of dissemination of philosophy in Brazilian newspapers. Personal Web Page UiT Cristin

Tomasz Jarymowicz is a Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Tromsø. His primary research interests are deliberative democracy and public sphere, justifications of freedom of speech as well as ethics of citizenship. He also focuses his attention on feminism and the relationship between Political theory and rhetoric. He received his Master's Degree with merit from the university of Wroclaw, Poland. Currently Tomasz Jarymowicz is pursuing research on autonomy-based justifications of absolute theories of freedom of speech. Cristin

Kristoffer Mällberg is a master's degree student at the Department of Philosophy, University of Tromsø. Advisor: Erik Christensen

National collaborative partners:

• The Research Group in Ethics, Society, and Technology, Program for Applied Ethics, Department of Philosophy, NTNU
• Associate Professor Trygve Lavik, Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen
• Professor Nils Oskal, The Sami University College
• Professor Andreas Føllesdal, Faculty of Law and the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo
• Associate Professor Odin Lysaker, Department of Religion, Philosophy and History, The University of Agder

• The Research Group Rhetoric and Democracy, University of Málaga
• Associate Professor Morten Raffnsøe-Møller, Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University