Summary
Jason Fisette has won several teaching awards, including runner-up for the Alan Bible Teaching Excellence Award (2024), the College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Advising Award (2022), the College of Liberal Arts Dean's Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Member of the Contingent Faculty (2017) and the Senior Scholar Mentor Award (in 2018 from the School of Social Work and in 2020 from the College of Liberal Arts). He has twice been nominated by his students for the Paul & Judy Bible University Teaching Excellence Award (2017 & 2022). In 2014, he served as Scholar-in-Residence at George Berkeley's Whitehall Museum House in Middletown, Rhode Island. In 2019, he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Hume Society, and he now serves as the Executive Vice President and Treasurer of the Hume Society.
Fisette’s research focuses on the ethical, metaphysical and political philosophy of early modernists, especially that of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Taken cumulatively, his work on Hume significantly revises our understanding of key claims in Hume’s metaethics, which are standardly thought to broadcast Hume’s skepticism about the existence of moral facts and moral reasoning. Fisette offers a new interpretation on which Hume is more accurately understood as a quietist who prescinds from his contemporaries’ realism/antirealism and moral psychological debates on the grounds that they are unintelligible. His article on Kant develops a new argument for slavery reparations that takes seriously Black thought and activism on the topic and disarms several supposedly fatal objections to reparations for this historic injustice.
Research interests
- History of Early Modern Philosophy
- Ethics
- David Hume
- Immanuel Kant
Courses taught
- Philosophy 101 — Introduction to Philosophy: Happiness
- Philosophy 135 – Introduction to Ethics: Evil
- Philosophy 210 — World Religions
- Philosophy 213 — Introduction to Modern Philosophy
- Philosophy 275 – Undergraduate Research
- Philosophy 317 — History of Ethical Theory
- Philosophy 318 — History of Political Philosophy
- Philosophy 323 – Problems in the Philosophy of Religion
- Philosophy 415 — Kant
Recent publications
- “At the Bar of Conscience: A Kantian Argument for Slavery Reparations,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 48, no. 5 (2022): 674–702. DOI: 10.1177/01914537211001916
- “Hume’s Quietism about Moral Ontology in Treatise 3.1.1,” Hume Studies 46, no.1 (2020): 57–100. DOI: 10.1353/hms.2020.0002
- "Hume on the Stoic Rational Passions and 'Original Existences'," Journal of the History of Philosophy 55, no. 4 (2017): 609-639. DOI: 10.1353/hph.2017.0068.
- "Hume on the Lockean Metaphysics of Secondary Qualities," Hume Studies 40, no. 1 (2014): 95-136. DOI: 10.1353/hms.2014.0011
Education
- Ph.D., Philosophy, New School for Social Research, 2015
- M.A., Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, 2008
- B.A., Philosophy, minor in Political Science, The George Washington University, 2004