Faculty

Colin Heydt received his Ph.D. at Boston University in 2003 and joined the Philosophy Department at USF in 2005. Heydt's research focuses on the history of ethics and political philosophy. He is the author of Rethinking Mill's Ethics: Character and Aesthetic Education (Continuum, 2006), Moral Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: God, Self, and Other (Cambridge, 2018) as well as numerous chapters in edited collections and articles published in Journal of the History of Philosophy, Journal of the History of Ideas, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, History of European Ideas, History of Philosophy Quarterly, and Hume Studies. He has been the recipient of fellowships from ACLS, NEH, the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Historical Studies), the Howard Foundation, and the USF Humanities Institute. 

Heydt is currently working on a book, Hierarchy, that offers an original account for why hierarchy persists and why egalitarian movements often falter. It argues that standard scholarly treatments too often reduce hierarchy to domination, thereby neglecting how hierarchies can also serve as useful social technologies for solving recurring problems of coordination, decision-making, information flow, and conflict. The book has three aims: First, to characterize and taxonomize hierarchy. It defines hierarchy as a systematic, socially significant inequality that has four fundamental types: dominance, achievement, organizational, and social. Second, to examine the forces that produce and maintain hierarchy. Third, to sharpen and complicate how we evaluate hierarchy and equality.