People

Cristina Lafont

Wender-Lewis Research and Teaching Professor of Philosophy
Office: Crowe 3-155
E-mail: clafont@northwestern.edu
Phone: 847-491-2550

Cristina Lafont is Wender-Lewis Research and Teaching Professor of Philosophy (PhD University of Frankfurt, 1992; Habilitation University of Frankfurt, 2000). She specializes in German philosophy, particularly hermeneutics and critical theory. She is the author of The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy (MIT Press, 1999), Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and co-editor of the Habermas Handbuch (Metzler Verlag, 2010). She has also published numerous articles in contemporary moral and political philosophy. One of her current research projects focuses on a defense of an ideal of deliberative democracy that could be implemented beyond national borders. She has received a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for 2012-13 to work on this project. She has also been named to the Spinoza Chair at the University of Amsterdam for the spring of 2011.

CURRENT CV

Work

Books

Habermas Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2009). Co-edited with H. Brunkhorst and R. Kreide.
Heidegger, Language and World-Disclosure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999)
- Galician (~Portuguese) translation of ch.2: "A Consideración da linguaxe na súa dimensión constitutiva nas conceptións de Humboldt", Grial 40 (2002), 35-67.
Sprache und Welterschließung. Zur linguistischen Wende der Hermeneutik Heideggers (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1994).
- Spanish Edition: Lenguaje y apertura del mundo (Madrid: Alianza Ed., 1997)
La razón como lenguaje. Un analisis del giro linguístico en la filosofía del lenguaje alemana (Madrid: Visor, 1993)

Selection of Recent Articles

"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?”, in Ethics & 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.
"Heidegger and the Synthetic Apriori", in J. Malpas and S. Crowell (eds.), Transcendental Heidegger, California: Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 104-118.
"Was Heidegger an Externalist?", in Inquiry 48/6 (2005), pp. 507-532.
"Universalization or Threat Advantage: The Difficult Dialogue between Discourse Ethics and The Theory of Rational Choice", in Dialogue 44 (2005), pp. 373-82.
"Heidegger's Hermeneutics", in H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Heidegger , Cambridge , MA : Blackwell, 2005, pp. 265-284.
"Moral Objectivity and Reasonable Agreement: Can Realism be reconciled with Kantian Constructivism?", Ratio Juris 17/1 (2004), pp. 27-51.
"Procedural Justice? Implications of the Rawls-Habermas Debate for Discourse Ethics", Philosophy and Social Criticism , 29/2 (2003), pp.167-185.
"Précis of Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure ", Inquiry 45 (2002), pp.185-90.
"Replies", Inquiry 45 (2002), pp.229-48.