Tim Aylsworth

About Me

I am an associate professor of philosophy at Florida International University. I got my PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018.  My areas of specialization are Kant and ethics. I work on a variety of questions that come up at the intersection of Kant's practical and theoretical philosophy. Most of my recent work involves applying Kant's moral philosophy to issues in the ethics of technology. You can read more about my research and download some of my papers here.  

My colleague, Clinton Castro, and I have written a couple papers defending the claim that we have moral reasons to be intentional about our relationship with addictive technologies (smartphones, social media, etc.).  We recently turned this project into a book published by Palgrave Macmillan (free to download through Open Access). For more information, see my research page. To get a better idea of the project, you can read the blog post we wrote for the APA or check out our favorite chapter (which addresses social/political issues like fake news, polarization, and democratic legitimacy).

I am also working on some projects in applied and normative ethics. I have spent a few years thinking about the "problem of collective harm." These are cases where we collectively cause a bad outcome (e.g., global warming, factory farming of animals, etc.) but each agent can plausibly claim that her individual contribution does not make a difference. I have written a few papers on that. In addition to this issue, I have a wide variety of interests in applied ethics: technology, advertising, bioethics, animal ethics, environmental ethics, and much more.

I started teaching  at Texas A&M in 2008, and I continued at UW-Madison in 2010. I came to FIU in 2018. I've taught several courses over the years including formal and informal logic, ethics, intro, ancient,  modern, and Kant. Check out my teaching page for more details, including information about current classes. 

My CV is available here.

When I'm not studying or teaching philosophy, I'm probably pursuing one of my many hobbies: music, tennis, running, cycling, cooking, the board game go, and learning languages. You can find out more here.