Wholly original and deeply insightful, Facing Authority aims to re-orient debates on political legitimacy away from the articulation of abstract moral criteria towards the investigation of the practical predicament of political agents engaged in judging legitimacy. Fossen's work both establishes a novel agenda for work on political legitimacy and models a valuable new approach to the practice of political philosophy.
Thomas Fossen is Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at Leiden University, the Netherlands. His research is in political philosophy (or political theory), at the intersection with political science and philosophy of language. His work addresses questions of political legitimacy, political obligation, and political representation. Fossen was previously a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, KU Leuven, and the University of Essex. In 2015, he received a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). In 2020-2021, he was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Humboldt Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt.
