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Victoria College
About Victoria / Victoria College Fellows & Associates / Duncan

Office Phone: TBA
Office Location: 216 Larkin
E-mail: jduncan@trinity.utoronto.ca
Office Hours: Wednesday 10 a.m.–noon, or by appointment

Degrees:
BA and MA philosophy, Carleton University
PhD Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, York University

John Duncan completed his PhD in the interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University in 1998, immediately after which he joined the faculty at the University of King’s College in Halifax. In 2002 he founded the international bilingual society for the study of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC) and served as its president until May 2009. During a 2004–05 sabbatical leave he was Ashley Fellow at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, a year in which he co-founded PhaenEx, EPTC's interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal. He remained a PhaenEx executive editor until the summer of 2012 when he co-edited a 400-page issue in commemoration of EPTC’s 10-year anniversary (PhaenEx 7.1., spring/summer, 2012). In the summer of 2005 he was appointed assistant professor and director of the Ethics, Society, and Law (ES&L) program at Trinity, as well as an instructor in the Margaret MacMillan Trinity One Program in public policy, ethics, international relations, and health science, for which he served as director from July 2012 to August 2014. From 2006 to 2011 he was an executive member of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics, for which he organized the October 2011 Public Issues Forum: On the very idea of a good war: Afghanistan 10 years in. Beginning at Trinity in 2007 and continuing in partnership with Victoria College in the University of Toronto (where he is an associate) from 2010, he co-founded the Humanities for Humanity outreach program and remains its academic director. Starting from the 2011–12 year he has led Victoria College’s Culture, Conflict, and the Media seminar, and served as the academic director for its Theatre for Thought outreach program, both of which are part of Victoria’s Ideas for the World program. In January 2014 he became the first holder of the appointment of  faculty advisor for the Ideas for the World program at Victoria. From June 2013 to June 2015 he has served as vice president of the Canadian Peace Research Association. He has co-edited a volume on the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as issues of PhaenEx, written chapters, articles,reviews and opinion pieces on the history of philosophy, continental philosophy, and politics, and given many talks on the same subjects. His feature article on close air support and civilian casualties in Afghanistan,“Death from Above,” first published in This Magazine, March/April, 2010, was re-published in Tightrope Books’ The Best Canadian Essays: 2011. He published a chapter in October 2013 on the virtue of deep dissent, and is currently working on a book on the war in Afghanistan. 

Publications:

On the Afghanistan intervention

On various political topics

 On various topics in continental philosophy

  • "Descent to the Things Themselves: The Virtue of Dissent." Invited Chapter. Editors: Kevin Hermberg and Paul Gyllenhammer put together the volume Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics for  Bloomsbury Publishing, Fall 2013. http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/phenomenology-and-virtue-ethics-9781780937359/
  •  “Michel Foucault,” 3,500 word article for the Encyclopedia Of Media And Communication. Edited by Marcel Danesi. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. May, 2013. http://www.utppublishing.com/Encyclopedia-of-Media-and-Communication.html
  • “On Heidegger and Happiness.” PhaenEx (http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/). A book encounter (an extended review of,and engagement with, a new book), in this case: Matthew King. Heidegger and Happiness: Dwelling on Fitting and Being (Continuum: New York, 2009).
  • “Sartre’s Pure Critical Theory,” pages 130-175, Rethinking 1968—a special topics issue, PhaenEx Vol 4, No 2.December 2009.
  • “Culture, Tragedy and Pessimism in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy,”pages 47–70, The Inaugural Special Topics Issue: On Resurfacing Tragedy. PhaenEx,Vol. 1, No. 2 (2006) 1-122.
  •  “Sartre and Realism-all-the-Way-Down,” pages 91–113, in Adrian van den Hoven and Andrew Leak, editors. Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration (Berghahn Books,2005).
    • All contents also published in Sartre Studies International, Vol. 11, No. ½ (2005). 
    • This paper is discussed at length in Steven Hendley’s“Realism and Contingency: Elaborating a Viable Sartrean Response to Rorty’s Anti-Realism,” in New Perspectives on Sartre, edited by Adrian Mirvish and Adrian van den Hoven (Cambridge Scholars Publishing: September, 2010), pages 161–177.

 On various topics in the humanities 

  •  “Frankenstein’s Message: Life Without Love is Monstrous,” First Light, June 2011.
  •  “Rorty, Richard,” pages 1488–1489. In George Thomas Kurian, editor in chief, and James E. Alt, Simone Chambers, Geoffrey Garrett, Margaret Levi, Paula D. McClain, associate editors. The Encyclopedia of Political Science in five volumes. (CQ Press: Washington, D.C., 2011). Information at:  http://www.cqpress.com/product/Encyclopedia-of-Political-Science.html
  •  “Sophists,” pages 1574–1575. In George Thomas Kurian, editor in chief, and James E. Alt, Simone Chambers, Geoffrey Garrett, Margaret Levi, Paula D. McClain, associate editors. The Encyclopedia of Political Science in five volumes. (CQ Press: Washington, D.C., 2011). Information at:  http://www.cqpress.com/product/Encyclopedia-of-Political-Science.html
  • Mark Blackell, and Simon Kow, editors. Rousseau and Desire (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, December 2009). 206 pages.
  • “Perfectibility, Chance, and the Mechanism of Desire Multiplication in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality,” pages 17–45, in Rousseau and Desire.
  • “Toward an Ethical Critique of Academic Ethics—one small community-based example.” Mindful: Undergraduate Journal of Ethics and Political Theory, Issue 3, Autumn 2008, 14–17. Available on line at: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/pcu/img/Mindful_2008_UTP_Publication.pdf
  • Review of Sankar Muthu’s Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton University Press, 2003),for The Dalhousie Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Spring, 2005) 137–138.