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Ruth Porter Groff, Ph.D.

Professor
Political Science

Affiliated Faculty
Philosophy

Courses Taught

Courses in the history of social, political and moral thought, as well as courses about structural power.

Education

  • Ph.D., York University (Canada)
  • M.A., University of Toronto
  • B.A., Swarthmore College

Research Interests

  • Metaphysics (esp. causal powers)
  • Select figures in the history of philosophy
  • Meta-philosophy 

Publications and Media Placements

Selected publications

Books

  • A Critical Introduction to Causal Powers and Dispositions, Bloomsbury, under contract.
  • Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy, Routledge, 2012.
  • Critical Realism, Post-Positivism and the Possibility of Knowledge, Routledge, 2004.
Edited Volumes
  • Subject & Object: Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology, Ontology and Method, Bloomsbury, 2014.
  • (co-edited with John Greco), Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism, Routledge, 2013.
  • Revitalizing Causality: Realism About Causality in Philosophy and Social Science, Routledge, 2008.
Articles
  • “The Devil is in the Categories: Metaphysics in Social and Political Thought,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, August, 2021. doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12320.
  • “Conceptualizing Causal Powers: Activity, Capacity, Essence, Necessitation,” Synthese, 2021, Special Issue: New Foundations of Dispositionalism, June 18, 2021. 10.1007/s11229-021-03229-x. 
  • “What Does the Doing? On Powers, Things and Powerful Things,” in (ed). Anne Sophie Meincke, Dispositionalism: Perspectives from Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, Synthese Library Series, 2020, pp. 27-40.
  • “Sublating the Free Will Problematic: Powers, Agency and Causal Determination,” Synthese, Special Issue, 196, January 2019, pp. 179-200.
  • “Causal Mechanisms and the Philosophy of Causation,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 47:3, 2017, pp. 286-305.
  • “On the Ethical Contours of Thin Aristotelian Marxism,” in (ed.) Michael Thompson, Constructing Marxist Ethics, Brill, 2015.
  • “Whose Powers? Which Agency?” in (eds., Ruth Groff and John Greco) Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism, Routledge, 2012; pp. 207-227. 
  • “Aristotelian Marxism/Marxist Aristotelianism: MacIntyre, Marx and the Analysis of Abstraction,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, October 2012, Vol. 38, pp. 775-792. 
  • “Getting Past Hume in the Philosophy of Social Science,” in (eds., McKay, Russo and Williamson) Causality in the Sciences, Oxford University Press, 2011; pp. 296-316.

Professional Organizations and Associations

  • Coordinator and founding member of the Critical Social Ontology Workshop (CSOW), an international multi-disciplinary academic association. CSOW holds an annual conference.
  • Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Aristotelian Studies and Critical Theory.
  • Member of Extended Research Network, Dynamis: The Finnish Network for Metaphysics.