I am a PhD candidate in Political Theory, supervised by Prof Katrin Flikschuh. I hold a BA in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin and master’s degrees from LSE and Oxford University, where I graduated with an MPhil in Political Theory (with Distinction) in 2013.
Thesis
Kant and the Global Standpoint
My thesis offers a novel reading of Kant’s cosmopolitanism as concerned less with laying out a particular normative agenda (such as delivering blueprints for a global institutional order or principles to adjudicate global shares) rather than attempting to pose a deeper, more systematic question: what it would actually mean to think globally. The conceptual cornerstone of this interpretation is constituted by a set of considerations whose crucial significance for Kant’s political philosophy has hitherto been largely neglected: the concurrent existence of a plurality of embodied agents (that I call ‘earth dwellers’) on the spherical surface of the earth. My shift to this kind of moral relation presents Kant’s cosmopolitanism as conceiving a distinctly first-personal standpoint through which agents reflexively recognise their systematic interdependence in a world of limited space. The emerging framework not only provides a fresh view on a number of hotly contested interpretive issues (from the moral status of statehood to Kant’s anti-colonialism and his political teleology), its open-endedness also strikingly contrasts with current global justice theorists’ tendency to jump to ready-made solutions to shared global problems.
Research interests
-
Kant’s practical philosophy
-
Authority, legitimacy and territorial rights
-
Methodology and meta-level justification in normative theorising
-
Early modern political thought
Publications
“Cosmopolitanism for Earth Dwellers: Kant on the Right to be Somewhere”, forthcoming in Kantian Review 1/2017.
“No right to unilaterally claim your territory: on the consistency of Kantian statism”, forthcoming in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy
“What makes Human Rights ‘Political’? A Kantian Critique” in Journal for Human Rights / Zeitschrift für Menschenrechte 7(2) (2013), 127-141.
Contact
Email: J.Huber@lse.ac.uk
Website: jakobhuber.com
I co-edit theorieblog.de, a German political theory and philosophy blog.