Avery Kolers

Professor and Chair, Philosophy Department

About

Prof. Kolers specializes in social & political philosophy and applied ethics. He frequently teaches Political Philosophy, Environmental Ethics, Philosophy of Law, Ethics, courses in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and graduate courses in Health Care Ethics. He is available to supervise theses and serve on committees broadly in areas of ethics and social & political philosophy.

Prof. Kolers has longstanding research interests in issues surrounding territorial rights and solidarity. These highly “applied” issues touch on a wide range of problems, but also raise hard questions about how to navigate deep diversity in a shared world. More recently he has been researching the philosophy of sports and games, in order to better understand ethical behavior as embodied skill, and to articulate the kinds of sociability made possible by games, and the prospects for incorporating this sociability into everyday life.

He has published two books: Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and A Moral Theory of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2016). Each book was honored with the Canadian Philosophical Association’s biennial book prize. He has been a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and Rice University.

Prof. Kolers also edits the Journal of Applied Philosophy.