Summary
Jason Fisette has won several teaching and service awards, including President's Faculty of the Month Award of Excellence (July 2025), 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). Twice, he has 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. Since 2023, he has served 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
- Philosophy of religion
Courses taught
- PHIL 101: Introduction to Philosophy (Happiness)
- PHIL 135: Introduction to Ethics (Evil)
- PHIL 210: World Religions
- PHIL 213: Introduction to Modern Philosophy
- PHIL 275: Undergraduate Research
- PHIL 317: History of Ethical Theory
- PHIL 318: History of Political Philosophy
- PHIL 323: Problems in the Philosophy of Religion
- PHIL 404: 19th Century Philosophy (Kierkegaard)
- PHIL 415: Kant
- PHIL 495: Professional Internship
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