Victoria Kamsler

A visitor in the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies from 2003 till 2006, Victoria Kamsler has taught ethics and political philosophy at Harvard, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Queens College CUNY, the University of Georgia, and both the Politics and Philosophy Departments at Princeton. While at the Institute for Advanced Study, she had a concurrent appointment in the Princeton Philosophy Department, teaching seminars in Environmental Ethics and Political Judgment. In October 2004 she organized a Forum on the Environment, at Princeton University.

Victoria Kamsler is on the Advisory Board of the All Species Foundation, a cooperative venture among scientists and environmental theorists dedicated to the taxonomy and genomic identification of all living species. While a graduate student at Oxford University, she worked in the British House of Commons, on the congressional staff of Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder and in the Foreign Policy Office of Senator Edward Kennedy. She also worked as a public policy consultant at ICF, a major Washington DC consulting firm, specializing in environmental and nuclear regulatory issues.

While at IAS, her research interests included articles and invited lectures on the following subjects:

• Democratic Theory
  Pursuing Philip Pettit's suggestion that contemporary theories of deliberative democracy are unduly "ratiocinative," she address Pettit's "conceptual challenge" with a theory of conceptualization and cognitive innovation in democratic discourse. She considers the relation of theoretical and practical reason in deliberation, the role of theoretical reason in conceptualization, and considers recent work in the philosophy of language that helps us to understand how concepts are formed and transformed.
  
• Kant and Political Judgment
  Hannah Arendt famously held that Kant's Critique of Judgment contained Kant's 'unwritten political philosophy.' This view has influenced a large and growing body of literature on judgment. A close reading of Kant reveals 'Arendt's mistake,' and retrieves other aspects of Kant's account, neglected by Arendt, that do in fact yield insights into political judgment.
  
• Capabilities and the Environment
  The capability theory of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum has provided an invaluable alternative to standard economic accounts of welfare. Can environmental values be represented within the terms of this theory? If not, what consequences does this have for the theory, and can it be appropriately reconfigured?
  
• Thucydides and Hobbes on Deliberation
  Two of the great skeptics of democracy present related accounts of the defects of deliberation as a tool of practical rationality. Their arguments prefigure certain contemporary criticisms of deliberative democracy, and provide unlooked-for avenues for enhancement of democratic theory.
  
• History of Utopian Thought
  More than a hundred years before the publication of Thomas More's Utopia, Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies put forward an idealized 'city in speech' combining a distinctive proto-feminist therapeutic approach to philosophical argument, virtue theory, allegory and historiography.