James S. Pearson

My guiding aim is to explore how we can maximise human flourishing. My belief is that this goal is best achieved through an inclusive form of social democracy, although far more theoretical and practical work is required to realise this leftist ideal. 

While my perspective is resolutely left-of-center, much of my work engages critically with the challenges posed by authoritarian and conservative thinkers. These thinkers often contend that flourishing depends on practices typically regarded as illiberal and undemocratic—such as coercion, manipulation, war, and exclusion. In my research, I examine how such practices might be sublimated and incorporated into a thriving social democracy. For example, my book Nietzsche on Conflict, Struggle and War (Cambridge University Press, 2022) explores how polities can redirect competitive impulses away from destructive military violence toward more productive forms of contest, such as athletic, artistic, or democratic opposition. Similarly, I've written about how Rawls's vision of a just society problematically seeks to eradicate competitive emotions such as envy, when there might in fact be fruitful ways of harnessing these emotions through policy reform and institutional engineering. 

I identify as a political realist insofar as I'm interested in constructing a leftist ideal that countenances the real conditions of human flourishing. Much of my work in contemporary democratic theory is informed by this realist perspective.

Currently, my Marie Skłodowska-Curie project at the University of Amsterdam focuses on the nature of political crises, with a special emphasis on climate change. This research addresses questions such as: How do governments define and identify crises? And how can social democracies endure and even flourish amid crises? A key aspect of this work explores the ethics of public communication during crises, and more specifically, whether alarmism is a permissible tool for motivating collective action.

I also maintain a strong interest in aesthetics. My research at the University of Lisbon is in the philosophy of creativity. I particularly focus on the social value of creativity, and examine how democracies can foster socially beneficial forms of creative behaviour while curbing its more harmful forms.

I received my PhD in Philosophy (cum laude) from Leiden University in 2018. Prior to this, I earned my MA (with distinction) from the University of Warwick in 2011, and my undergraduate MA (with first-class honours) from the University of Dundee in 2010.

I have also been a visiting scholar in Philosophy at the University of Oxford (2012) and in Political Science at Stanford University (2024).

Since 2023, I've been working at the University of Amsterdam as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science. This position is funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Fellowship.

In 2022, I began a 6-year research position at the Centre of Philosophy at the University of Lisbon (CFUL). This position has been suspended for the duration of my fellowship at the University of Amsterdam.

Between 2019 and 2022, I worked as a Postdoc in Practical Philosophy at the University of Tartu (Estonia). This was part of an individual research project on multicultural disagreement (funded by the European Commission).

From 2017 to 2019, I worked as a Lecturer in Philosophy at Leiden University. 

My PhD (2012–2017) at Leiden University was fully funded by the NWO (Dutch Research Council) as part of the research programme "Between Deliberation and Agonism: Rethinking Conflict and its Relation to Law in Political Philosophy."