Christopher Yeomans

DR. CHRIS YEOMANS is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Riverside in 2005 before joining the Purdue faculty in 2009. He is the author of three monographs, Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency, The Expansion of Autonomy: Hegel's Pluralistic Philosophy of Action, and The Politics of German Idealism: Law & Social Change at the Turn of the 19th Century (all from Oxford University Press). His work has been supported by the Purdue Provost’s Faculty Fellowship for Study in a Second Discipline (history), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

His broad project is to develop a political theory that integrates the conceptual riches of post-Kantian autonomy, the phenomenological riches of an expressivist moral psychology, and the political riches of concrete social and historical description. With co-author Justin Litaker, he is currently at work on a monograph tentatively entitled A Critical Theory of Economic Agency, which attempts to provide a normative theory of banks, markets and firms to replace our outmoded normative concepts for economic activity. Only by abandoning the concepts of property and contract that were formed in the early modern period in response to feudalism can we come to an accurate theory of our current economic agency and thus determine what is valuable about it and ought to be protected in it.

Chris also continues to work and publish on the history of German philosophy.

Chris is a fan of all things two-wheeled, including mountain bikes and motorcycles

Specialization

Hegel and German Philosophy, Philosophy of Action, Political Philosophy