Cristina Lafont

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).

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

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
  • Global Governance and Human Rights (Spinoza Lectures Series), Amsterdam, van Gorcum, 2012. ISBN 9789023250753.
  • Habermas Handbuch, Stuttgart, Metzler Verlag, 2009. Co-edited with H. Brunkhorst and R. Kreide. ISBN 9783476022394. (English: Columbia University Press, forthcoming; Chinese: Social Sciences Academic Press Beijing, forthcoming).
  • Heidegger, Language and World-Disclosure, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2000. ISBN 9780521662475. (German: Sprache und Welterschließung. Zur linguistischen Wende der Hermeneutik Heideggers, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp 1994. ISBN 9783518581735; Spanish: Lenguaje y apertura del mundo, Madrid, Alianza Ed. 1997. ISBN 9788420628929.)
  • The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press 1999. ISBN 9780585190099. (Spanish: La razón como lenguaje, Madrid, Machado Libros 1993. ISBN 9788477748687. Chinese: Zhejiang University Press, forthcoming)
  • "Sovereignty and the International Protection of Human Rights", The Journal of Political Philosophy, doi: 10.1111/jopp.12086
  • "Philosophical Foundations of Judicial Review", in D. Dyzenhaus and M. Thornburn, eds., Philosophical Foundations of Constitutional Law, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
  • "Human Rights, Sovereignty, and the Responsibility to Protect", in Constellations 21/1 (2015), 68-78.
  • "Deliberation, Participation, and Democratic Legitimacy: Should Deliberative Mini-publics Shape Public Policy?", in Journal of Political Philosophy, 23/1 (2015), 40-63.
  • "Religious Pluralism in a Deliberative Democracy", in F. Requejo and C. Ungureanu, eds., Democracy, Law and Religious Pluralism in Europe, London: Routledge, forthcoming.
  • "Agreement and Consent in Kant and Habermas: Can Kantian Constructivism be fruitful for Democratic Theory?" in The Philosophical Forum 43/3 (2012), 277-95.
  • "Accountability and global governance: Challenging the state-centric conception of human rights," in Ethics & Global Politics, 3/3 (2010), 193-215.
  • "Religion and the Public Sphere. What are the Deliberative Obligations of Democratic Citizenship?", in Philosophy & Social Criticism, 35/1-2 (2009), 127-50.
  • "Alternative Visions of a New Global Order: What should Cosmopolitans hope for?", inEthics & Global Politics 1/1-2 (2008), 1-20.
  • "Meaning and Interpretation. Can Brandomian Scorekeepers be Gadamerian Hermeneuts?", in Philosophy Compass 2 (2007), 1-13.
  • "Religion in the Public Sphere: Remarks on Habermas's Conception of Public Deliberation in Post-secular Societies", in Constellations, 14/2 (2007), 236-56.
  • "Is the Ideal of a Deliberative Democracy Coherent?", in S. Besson and J.L. Martí (eds.), Deliberative Democracy and its Discontents, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 3–26.

References
  1. Cristina Lafont's personal page at Northwestern University's Department of Philosophy
  2. Lafont, Cristina (2014). "Deliberation, Participation, and Democratic Legitimacy: Should Deliberative Mini-publics Shape Public Policy?". Journal of Political Philosophy. 23: 40–63. doi:10.1111/jopp.12031.
  3. C. Lafont, "Religion and the Public Sphere"
  4. Lafont, Cristina (2015). "Sovereignty and the International Protection of Human Rights". Journal of Political Philosophy. 24 (4): 427–445. doi:10.1111/jopp.12086.
  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". Archived from the original on 2016-02-16. Retrieved 2016-02-07.
  13. Fellow-profile for Cristina Lafont at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
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