Murphy-Philosophy Seminar: Shterna Friedman

Organized by the Tulane Philosophy Department, the Murphy-Philosophy Seminars are a series of workshops where CE Faculty Fellows and distinguished guest speakers present works in progress on ethics, political philosophy, political theory, moral psychology, the philosophy of law, and intellectual history. Papers are distributed one week beforehand to the participants who read the paper and prepare discussion questions for the presenter.

Shterna Friedman is an Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard. She has taught in the Committee on Degrees of Social Studies at Harvard (2023-2024); and in the Department of Political Science at Tufts University (2022-2023). She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023. She majored in philosophy at Barnard College, and also received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

She is currently working on a manuscript tentatively entitled The Idea of a Social System: Kant, Hegel, and the Rise of Systemic Social Theory. It examines the emergence of the tendency to treat normative attributes (such as justice or oppression) as systemic rather than individual properties. More generally, her research focuses on the epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions of modern systemic social theory as developed by the German Idealists, and further elaborated and criticized by such later thinkers as Marx, Durkheim, Parsons, and Foucault. Trained in early modern political thought, she is interested in the deep historical sources of the present and the often unarticulated assumptions that underlie ordinary and philosophical social and political discourse. She is also interested in issues of social ontology, political metaphysics, historical causation, political epistemology, and the methodology of the social sciences.