Dr Kelvin Knight

Director of CASEP,
the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics

In a former academic life, Kelvin received a doctorate at the London School of Economics for a thesis on The Myth of Functional Representation: Neo-Corporatism, Guild Socialism, Citizenship, and the Concept of Function, taught in the LSE's Government Department, co-founded (with T. Malakos) the Polis seminar series, and was a founding editor (alongside O. Igwara, A. Leoussi, T. Mulhall and A. D. Smith) of the journal Nations and Nationalism. He then moved to London Met as a Senior Lecturer in order to design and lead its BA course in Politics. After joining the University's excellent Human Rights and Social Justice Research Institute, Kelvin established a Masters degree course in Human Rights and Social Justice that he still leads. At doctoral level, he sits on the University's Research Degrees Committee and supervises theses in international relations theory, analytic moral philosophy, legal theory, and contemporary Aristotelian approaches to both family and management.

Now, Kelvin is best known as a leading advocate of the Aristotelian tradition in ethics and politics. His shift to Aristotelianism followed his move to London Met, in part because Aristotelianism's conceptual scheme provides fine theoretical resources for understanding the goods, rationality and institutional context of his intellectual practice. He therefore established the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics here, as an international assocation for the evaluation, elaboration and application of Aristotelian arguments. This enterprise is strengthened by Alasdair MacIntyre, CASEP's Senior Research Fellow. Previously, Kelvin hosted the 2007 conference that gave rise to the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry, of which he is Chair. In addition, he is Secretary of the Contemporary Aristotelian Studies specialist group of the Political Studies Association, which held its inaugural conference at London Met in June 2011, and is a prospective editor of a journal, Contemporary Aristotelian Studies, which is supported by sixty of the world's leading Aristotelian academics.

Much of the philosophical groundwork for these projects was laid in:

• Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007.

In addition, Kelvin has edited the following books:

• The MacIntyre Reader, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998,
                                    & Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998.
• Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia (with P. Blackledge)
                                    Stuttgart, Lucius & Lucius, 2008.
• Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism (with P. Blackledge)
                                    Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2011.

Within the past three years, Kelvin has pursued the Aristotelian cause by speaking in the USA, Ireland, Greece, Finland, Lithuania, Switzerland and Spain, and by writing "Practices: The Aristotelian Concept" (Analyse & Kritik, 30/2: 317-329, 2008), "Hannah Arendt's Heideggerian Aristotelianism" (Topos, 19/2: 5-30, 2008), "Goods" (Philosophy of Management, 7/1: 107-122, 2008), "After Tradition?: Heidegger or MacIntyre, Aristotle and Marx" (Analyse & Kritik, 30/1: 33-52, 2008), "Paul Hirst's Pluralism" (Political Studies 56/3: 737-741, 2008, with J. Edwards), "MacIntyre's Progress" (Journal of Moral Philosophy 6/1: 115-126, 2009), "Revisionary Aristotelianism: Thomism Transformed, Marxism Outmoded, Pragmatism Opposed" (in F. O’Rourke ed., Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), "Agency and Ethics, Past and Present" (Historical Materialism 19/1: 145–174, 2011), "What's the Good of Post-Analytic Philosophy?" (History of European Ideas 37/3: 304-14, 2011), "Virtue and Meaningful Work" (Business Ethics Quarterly 22/2, 2012, with R. Beadle), and "Revolutionary Aristotelianism" and "Virtue, Politics, and History: Rival Enquiries into Action and Order" (in Knight & Blackledge edd., Virtue and Politics). In an as yet unwritten paper (for Knight and A. Bielskis edd., Virtue and Economy, forthcoming), he intends to revisit his unpublished doctoral research in the light of his more recent Aristotelianism. Other forthcoming publications include "Rules, Goods, and Powers" (in J. Greco & R. Groff edd., Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism, Routledge, 2012) and "Aristotle" (in T. Ball ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Political Thought). His current research relates his interests in Aristotelianism and in human rights, by interrogating the latter's intellectual history.