Joseph Heath
15 King's College Circle, Toronto ON, M5S 3H7
Campus: St. George
Joseph Heath FRSC (born 1967) is a Canadian philosopher. He is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he was formerly the director of the Centre for Ethics. He also teaches at the School of Public Policy and Governance. Heath's webpage at the University of Toronto declares his work "is all related, in one way or another, to critical social theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. He has published both academic and popular writings, including the bestselling The Rebel Sell, which he coauthored with Andrew Potter. His philosophical work includes papers and books in political philosophy, business ethics, rational choice theory, action theory, and critical theory. His stepmother is June Clark.
He received his Bachelor of Arts from McGill University in 1990, where his teachers included Charles Taylor, and his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy (1995) degrees are from Northwestern University, where he studied under Thomas A. McCarthy and Jürgen Habermas.
Heath is the recipient of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship (2012). In 2013, Heath was named to the Royal Society of Canada. His popular book Enlightenment 2.0 won the 2014 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. In 2021 Heath published an op-ed in the Globe and Mail which argued that the acronym BIPOC is problematic in the Canadian context, suggesting instead the acronym FIVM for "Francophone, Indigenous, and Visible Minority".
Education
- PhD, Northwestern University
- MA, Northwestern University
- BA, McGill University
Research Interests
- Social and political philosophy
- Business ethics
- Moral philosophy
- Distributive justice
Publications
Books
- Following the Rules (Oxford)
- Filthy Lucre (Harper Collins)
- Communicative Action and Rational Choice (MIT Press)
- The Efficient Society (Penguin)
- (with Andrew Potter) The Rebel Sell (Harper Collins)
- Enlightenment 2.0
- Morality, Competition, and the Firm (Oxford)
- The Machinery of Government (Oxford)
Selected Papers
- “The Benefits of Cooperation,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 34 (2006)
- “Dworkin’s Auction,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 3 (2005)
- “The Transcendental Necessity of Morality,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 67 (2003)
- “The Structure of Hip Consumerism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 27 (2001)
- “Foundationalism and Practical Reason,” Mind 106 (1997)
- “Is Language a Game?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 26 (1996)
- “The Structure of Intergenerational Cooperation,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 41:1 (2013)
- “Three Normative Models of the Welfare State,” Public Reason, 3 (2011)
- “Three Evolutionary Precursors to Morality,” Dialogue, 48 (2009)