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Liam Harte

Westfield State University, Philosophy, Faculty Member

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I hold a BA (Hons) in philosophy from the University of Ulster at Coleraine, an M.Phil in moral philosophy from the University of St Andrews, and a Ph.D in philosophy from Loyola University Chicago.

My first classes were given while I was a teaching fellow at Loyola in 1996, and I taught several more classes there as a part-timer. In 1999 I started as an adjunct in the Department of Philosophy at what was then Westfield State College (now a university), and in 2004 became a full-time faculty member there. I regularly teach social and political philosophy, Asian philosophy, formal logic and Asian studies. I've also taught introductory philosophy, ethics, history of philosophy, philosophy of religion and criminal justice ethics.

I've published several essays on the philosophical concept and moral psychology of terrorism, which were my research focus for quite a long time. More recently, I've become interested in the philosophies that accompany the new political authoritarianism present around the contemporary world, which, so far, I'm finding to be by no means unrelated to my prior research on terrorism in all its forms. Over the years, I've given research presentations in not only the US, but also the UK, Austria, Turkey, Portugal and (by Skype) Bulgaria.
Phone: Office: 413-572-8052
Address: Bates Hall 016B
Westfield State College
577 Western Avenue
Westfield
MA 01085

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Papers by Liam Harte

The Terror Continuum: Aims, Motivations, and Methods in " Non-State " and " State " Terrorism

The bottom line is that AQC [al-Qaeda Central] failed to conquer and retain territory and declare... more The bottom line is that AQC [al-Qaeda Central] failed to conquer and retain territory and declare a caliphate, whereas ISIS succeeded in both goals. Once could cynically argue that al-Qaeda's gradual approach toward declaring a caliphate was driven by its inability to capture and hold territory as ISIS did in Syria and Iraq. Capacity, not ideology, lies behind Al Qaeda's reluctance to proclaim an Islamic state. 1

Reading the Dao: A Thematic Introduction, by Keping Wang

Teaching Philosophy, 2015

Terrorism: A Philosophical Investigation," by Igor Primoratz

Teaching Philosophy, 2013

Cambridge: Polity, 2013, vii + 129 pp. Hardback $69.95 978-0-7456-5143-9; paperback $24.95 978-0-... more Cambridge: Polity, 2013, vii + 129 pp. Hardback $69.95 978-0-7456-5143-9; paperback $24.95 978-0-7456-5144-6. Anyone seriously interested in the philosophical dimension of the phenomenon of terrorism will already know that a book by Igor Primoratz is going to be worth reading. One of the few philosophers to have published more than just one or two essays on the subject, he now becomes, with Terrorism, one of the very few indeed to have published a monograph on it. The book brings together much of the work that Primoratz has published in articles over the quarter-century, relating what were once discrete arguments into a very clear overall structure. The general themes and writing style are reminiscent of such recent publications as Tamar Meisels's The Trouble with Terror: Liberty, Security, and the Response to Terrorism and Seumas Miller's Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Ethics and Liberal Democracy, which is to say that Primoratz's work is very squarely within the realm of analytical ethics. He betrays, however, no interest in the kinds of questions about the morality of counter-terrorism that exercise both Meisels and Miller. To that extent, the content of the book, being devoted wholly and unswervingly to terrorism itself, is more akin to that of

Indian Philosophy: An Introduction," by M. Ram Murty

Teaching Philosophy, 2014

“A Serious Problem”: Motivation, Reasonableness, and the Infeasibility of Overlapping Consensus.

In Political Liberalism, John Rawls proposes the idea of an overlapping consensus as the blueprin... more In Political Liberalism, John Rawls proposes the idea of an overlapping consensus as the blueprint for stabilizing pluralistic societies, having stipulated such pluralism as a corrective for his assumption, which he traces back to A Theory of Justice, that all citizens are Rawlsian liberals. I argue, first, that Rawls’s move merely replaces this assumption with, at best, the assumption that each and every citizen is a liberal of some kind; and, second, that this assumption sends the idea of overlapping consensus into an infinite regress that Rawls can escape only by accepting that the problem he is addressing either cannot be solved with an overlapping consensus, or is a pseudo-problem requiring no solution. Because I doubt that he can accept either alternative and can offer no third one, I conclude that implementing the idea of an overlapping consensus is infeasible wherever it is necessary, and unnecessary wherever it is feasible.

New Terrorism and Mythic Terrorism: The Place of Philosophy in Studies of Terrorism

I show philosophy’s relevance to studies of violent terrorism by exposing and proposing correctio... more I show philosophy’s relevance to studies of violent terrorism by exposing and proposing corrections for some serious logical flaws in the most widely accepted analysis of the concept of the “new terrorist,” which I call the "expert analysis" (EA). I argue, first, that the EA cannot distinguish between “new” and “old” terrorists, because it mistakes two sorts of quantitative difference—i.e., the greater destructiveness of particular actions and the relative scales of particular ends—for qualitative ones. (I call these two putative necessary conditions "the destructiveness condition" and "the fanaticism condition," respectively.) Nevertheless, the common intuition that some contemporary violent terrorists are more extreme than others still seems rather plausible. Therefore, I contend further that the fanaticism condition is salvageable when revised drastically. By applying the concept of "mythicism" to the general idea of violent terrorism, I re-characterize the “limitlessness” of some violent terrorists’ ambitions in a fruitful new way that represents their activity as neither simply quantitative nor utterly novel.

Freedom’s Threat: A Conceptual Analysis of the Liberty-Security Problem

In The Trouble with Terror, Tamar Meisels argues that liberal democracies should adopt a Hobbesea... more In The Trouble with Terror, Tamar Meisels argues that liberal democracies should adopt a Hobbesean standpoint on the relationship of liberty to security where dire emergencies (e.g., violent terrorism) are concerned, and a Lockean one on such normal security problems as violent crime. A key premise in her argument is the claim—which she attributes to both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke—that security is a necessary condition for liberty; and, from thence, she infers that security always has priority over liberty. My paper contests, first, that the classical contractualists do not and cannot take this view; and, second, that, if they did, their positions (and, therefore, Meisels’ own) would be seriously confused.

Overlapping Consensus: Incoherent or Superfluous

I show that John Rawls’s idea of an overlapping consensus cannot solve the stability problem on R... more I show that John Rawls’s idea of an overlapping consensus cannot solve the stability problem on Rawls’s own terms. Overlapping consensus and modus vivendi, are, Rawls says, “agreements in judgment.” As such, however, they are indistinguishable from, and therefore theoretically superfluous to each other. If, to avoid this problem, either idea is construed as that of anything but some kind of agreement in judgment, it becomes absurdly identical with Rawls’s categories of either “strict consensus” or “strictly-partitioned consensus.” The idea of an overlapping consensus must therefore be either incoherent or superfluous, and either way cannot solve the stability problem.

A Taxonomy of Terrorism

Must Terrorism Be Violent?

What I call the “violence analysis” (VA), a widespread attempt to define the term “terrorism,” is... more What I call the “violence analysis” (VA), a widespread attempt to define the term “terrorism,” is inadequate because it makes no reference to any analysis of terrorizing. I offer analyses of terrorizing and of intentional terrorizing, and argue, first, that intentional terrorizing is a necessary condition for terrorism and, second, that terrorism need not be violent if intentional terrorizing need not be. This shows that VAs mistake violent terrorism for terrorism per se. If my analysis of terrorism is presupposed by VAs, however, then their proper analytical value—as sets of sufficient conditions particular kinds of violent terrorism—is revealed.

Known Unknowns: How Current Philosophy Has Responded to Fear of the Post-9/11 World

This essay is concerned with how professional philosophers in the English-speaking world have rea... more This essay is concerned with how professional philosophers in the English-speaking world have reacted to the times that “9/11” inaugurated. I suggest that very little has changed besides the selection of topics about which we philosophize, though both this continuity and what change there has been bespeak our commitment to making experience intelligible at the conceptual level. One widespread reaction to the post-9/11 world is fear arising, arising from the unfamiliarity of the people who inhabit and the events that take place in this world. By trying to make these unknowns known to us on the conceptual level, philosophers can do their part to help overcome the fear that came in the train of 9/11.

Conference Presentations by Liam Harte

Evil, Necessary and Otherwise: Representations of Terrorist Violence in Popular Culture

News media can generate or sustain support for governmental policy, and in the west have certainl... more News media can generate or sustain support for governmental policy, and in the west have certainly done so during the War on Terror. Here, though, I concentrate on how popular culture can do the same kind of things. I’ll argue that television, movies, and popular literature that takes violent non-state terrorism as an important theme—e.g., Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty, The Kill List—rely heavily upon a particular generic narrative of a virtuous people threatened enemies, led by a “terrorist king,” whose gratuitous moral viciousness is simply a dramatic given. Such stories focus primarily on counter-terrorism operations, the violence of which is represented as a necessary suspension of normal ethical constraints in the face of an emergency. I go on to argue that this, like many other genres of popular culture (e.g., spy thrillers, slasher movies, police procedurals), have evolved from the marriage of eighteenth-century Gothic romance with nineteenth-century novels of French Revolutionary terror, most notably Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. While such generic narratives, rooted in the most libidinal parts of ourselves, can be “framing devices” as potent as anything to be found in the news media, they can also be both more blatant and more subtle, because the artifacts of popular culture need not aim at the intellect and thus need make no pretensions to objectivity. They may, thus, mold affects and attitudes even more unalterably than the press can.

Carwin the Terrorist: What Makes a Novel a Terrorist Novel, and Why It Makes Wieland One, Too.

In this paper I do three things. First, drawing on work by Walter Laqueur, Billi Mehlman, and Fra... more In this paper I do three things. First, drawing on work by Walter Laqueur, Billi Mehlman, and Francis Blesington, I sketch what seems to me the best account of the genre of the “inauthentic” terrorist novel (that is, novels written by non-terrorists). The essence of this composite theory is that the central character must choose between the “establishment” and the “cause”—when choosing the latter means engaging in violence against the former—or else effect an escape from both. I add my own refinement, that such narratives must feature at least one character, whom I call the “Terrorist-King,” a true believer often of an ascetic cast, whose major role is to confront the hero with the central choice. Second, after showing that the theory applies equally well to several American terrorist novels, separated from each other by great distances in time and attitude (e.g., The Princess Casamassima, Falling Man, and Terrorist), I contend that it applies well to at least one novel—Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: or, The Transformation (1798)—that long predates all of them and has never before been placed in the same category. Third, then, I suggest that this startling result neither indicates any flaw in the theory nor is merely coincidental but instead implies a substantial link between novels that depict violent non-state terrorism, and Wieland, which, following Rachel Hope Cleves and Larry Kutchen, I interpret as allegorizing the Jacobin Terror in France (1793-4). The upshot of this is that the terrorist novel’s distinctive structure may well be an American invention that illuminates, by its exploration of the central character’s ultimate motives, not rebel violence per se but far broader psychic themes of a people and its enemies, either real, imagined, or an amalgam of both.

The Terror Continuum: Aims, Motivations, and Methods in " Non-State " and " State " Terrorism

The bottom line is that AQC [al-Qaeda Central] failed to conquer and retain territory and declare... more The bottom line is that AQC [al-Qaeda Central] failed to conquer and retain territory and declare a caliphate, whereas ISIS succeeded in both goals. Once could cynically argue that al-Qaeda's gradual approach toward declaring a caliphate was driven by its inability to capture and hold territory as ISIS did in Syria and Iraq. Capacity, not ideology, lies behind Al Qaeda's reluctance to proclaim an Islamic state. 1

Reading the Dao: A Thematic Introduction, by Keping Wang

Teaching Philosophy, 2015

Terrorism: A Philosophical Investigation," by Igor Primoratz

Teaching Philosophy, 2013

Cambridge: Polity, 2013, vii + 129 pp. Hardback $69.95 978-0-7456-5143-9; paperback $24.95 978-0-... more Cambridge: Polity, 2013, vii + 129 pp. Hardback $69.95 978-0-7456-5143-9; paperback $24.95 978-0-7456-5144-6. Anyone seriously interested in the philosophical dimension of the phenomenon of terrorism will already know that a book by Igor Primoratz is going to be worth reading. One of the few philosophers to have published more than just one or two essays on the subject, he now becomes, with Terrorism, one of the very few indeed to have published a monograph on it. The book brings together much of the work that Primoratz has published in articles over the quarter-century, relating what were once discrete arguments into a very clear overall structure. The general themes and writing style are reminiscent of such recent publications as Tamar Meisels's The Trouble with Terror: Liberty, Security, and the Response to Terrorism and Seumas Miller's Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Ethics and Liberal Democracy, which is to say that Primoratz's work is very squarely within the realm of analytical ethics. He betrays, however, no interest in the kinds of questions about the morality of counter-terrorism that exercise both Meisels and Miller. To that extent, the content of the book, being devoted wholly and unswervingly to terrorism itself, is more akin to that of

Indian Philosophy: An Introduction," by M. Ram Murty

Teaching Philosophy, 2014

“A Serious Problem”: Motivation, Reasonableness, and the Infeasibility of Overlapping Consensus.

In Political Liberalism, John Rawls proposes the idea of an overlapping consensus as the blueprin... more In Political Liberalism, John Rawls proposes the idea of an overlapping consensus as the blueprint for stabilizing pluralistic societies, having stipulated such pluralism as a corrective for his assumption, which he traces back to A Theory of Justice, that all citizens are Rawlsian liberals. I argue, first, that Rawls’s move merely replaces this assumption with, at best, the assumption that each and every citizen is a liberal of some kind; and, second, that this assumption sends the idea of overlapping consensus into an infinite regress that Rawls can escape only by accepting that the problem he is addressing either cannot be solved with an overlapping consensus, or is a pseudo-problem requiring no solution. Because I doubt that he can accept either alternative and can offer no third one, I conclude that implementing the idea of an overlapping consensus is infeasible wherever it is necessary, and unnecessary wherever it is feasible.

New Terrorism and Mythic Terrorism: The Place of Philosophy in Studies of Terrorism

I show philosophy’s relevance to studies of violent terrorism by exposing and proposing correctio... more I show philosophy’s relevance to studies of violent terrorism by exposing and proposing corrections for some serious logical flaws in the most widely accepted analysis of the concept of the “new terrorist,” which I call the "expert analysis" (EA). I argue, first, that the EA cannot distinguish between “new” and “old” terrorists, because it mistakes two sorts of quantitative difference—i.e., the greater destructiveness of particular actions and the relative scales of particular ends—for qualitative ones. (I call these two putative necessary conditions "the destructiveness condition" and "the fanaticism condition," respectively.) Nevertheless, the common intuition that some contemporary violent terrorists are more extreme than others still seems rather plausible. Therefore, I contend further that the fanaticism condition is salvageable when revised drastically. By applying the concept of "mythicism" to the general idea of violent terrorism, I re-characterize the “limitlessness” of some violent terrorists’ ambitions in a fruitful new way that represents their activity as neither simply quantitative nor utterly novel.

Freedom’s Threat: A Conceptual Analysis of the Liberty-Security Problem

In The Trouble with Terror, Tamar Meisels argues that liberal democracies should adopt a Hobbesea... more In The Trouble with Terror, Tamar Meisels argues that liberal democracies should adopt a Hobbesean standpoint on the relationship of liberty to security where dire emergencies (e.g., violent terrorism) are concerned, and a Lockean one on such normal security problems as violent crime. A key premise in her argument is the claim—which she attributes to both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke—that security is a necessary condition for liberty; and, from thence, she infers that security always has priority over liberty. My paper contests, first, that the classical contractualists do not and cannot take this view; and, second, that, if they did, their positions (and, therefore, Meisels’ own) would be seriously confused.

Overlapping Consensus: Incoherent or Superfluous

I show that John Rawls’s idea of an overlapping consensus cannot solve the stability problem on R... more I show that John Rawls’s idea of an overlapping consensus cannot solve the stability problem on Rawls’s own terms. Overlapping consensus and modus vivendi, are, Rawls says, “agreements in judgment.” As such, however, they are indistinguishable from, and therefore theoretically superfluous to each other. If, to avoid this problem, either idea is construed as that of anything but some kind of agreement in judgment, it becomes absurdly identical with Rawls’s categories of either “strict consensus” or “strictly-partitioned consensus.” The idea of an overlapping consensus must therefore be either incoherent or superfluous, and either way cannot solve the stability problem.

A Taxonomy of Terrorism

Must Terrorism Be Violent?

What I call the “violence analysis” (VA), a widespread attempt to define the term “terrorism,” is... more What I call the “violence analysis” (VA), a widespread attempt to define the term “terrorism,” is inadequate because it makes no reference to any analysis of terrorizing. I offer analyses of terrorizing and of intentional terrorizing, and argue, first, that intentional terrorizing is a necessary condition for terrorism and, second, that terrorism need not be violent if intentional terrorizing need not be. This shows that VAs mistake violent terrorism for terrorism per se. If my analysis of terrorism is presupposed by VAs, however, then their proper analytical value—as sets of sufficient conditions particular kinds of violent terrorism—is revealed.

Known Unknowns: How Current Philosophy Has Responded to Fear of the Post-9/11 World

This essay is concerned with how professional philosophers in the English-speaking world have rea... more This essay is concerned with how professional philosophers in the English-speaking world have reacted to the times that “9/11” inaugurated. I suggest that very little has changed besides the selection of topics about which we philosophize, though both this continuity and what change there has been bespeak our commitment to making experience intelligible at the conceptual level. One widespread reaction to the post-9/11 world is fear arising, arising from the unfamiliarity of the people who inhabit and the events that take place in this world. By trying to make these unknowns known to us on the conceptual level, philosophers can do their part to help overcome the fear that came in the train of 9/11.

Evil, Necessary and Otherwise: Representations of Terrorist Violence in Popular Culture

News media can generate or sustain support for governmental policy, and in the west have certainl... more News media can generate or sustain support for governmental policy, and in the west have certainly done so during the War on Terror. Here, though, I concentrate on how popular culture can do the same kind of things. I’ll argue that television, movies, and popular literature that takes violent non-state terrorism as an important theme—e.g., Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty, The Kill List—rely heavily upon a particular generic narrative of a virtuous people threatened enemies, led by a “terrorist king,” whose gratuitous moral viciousness is simply a dramatic given. Such stories focus primarily on counter-terrorism operations, the violence of which is represented as a necessary suspension of normal ethical constraints in the face of an emergency. I go on to argue that this, like many other genres of popular culture (e.g., spy thrillers, slasher movies, police procedurals), have evolved from the marriage of eighteenth-century Gothic romance with nineteenth-century novels of French Revolutionary terror, most notably Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. While such generic narratives, rooted in the most libidinal parts of ourselves, can be “framing devices” as potent as anything to be found in the news media, they can also be both more blatant and more subtle, because the artifacts of popular culture need not aim at the intellect and thus need make no pretensions to objectivity. They may, thus, mold affects and attitudes even more unalterably than the press can.

Carwin the Terrorist: What Makes a Novel a Terrorist Novel, and Why It Makes Wieland One, Too.

In this paper I do three things. First, drawing on work by Walter Laqueur, Billi Mehlman, and Fra... more In this paper I do three things. First, drawing on work by Walter Laqueur, Billi Mehlman, and Francis Blesington, I sketch what seems to me the best account of the genre of the “inauthentic” terrorist novel (that is, novels written by non-terrorists). The essence of this composite theory is that the central character must choose between the “establishment” and the “cause”—when choosing the latter means engaging in violence against the former—or else effect an escape from both. I add my own refinement, that such narratives must feature at least one character, whom I call the “Terrorist-King,” a true believer often of an ascetic cast, whose major role is to confront the hero with the central choice. Second, after showing that the theory applies equally well to several American terrorist novels, separated from each other by great distances in time and attitude (e.g., The Princess Casamassima, Falling Man, and Terrorist), I contend that it applies well to at least one novel—Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: or, The Transformation (1798)—that long predates all of them and has never before been placed in the same category. Third, then, I suggest that this startling result neither indicates any flaw in the theory nor is merely coincidental but instead implies a substantial link between novels that depict violent non-state terrorism, and Wieland, which, following Rachel Hope Cleves and Larry Kutchen, I interpret as allegorizing the Jacobin Terror in France (1793-4). The upshot of this is that the terrorist novel’s distinctive structure may well be an American invention that illuminates, by its exploration of the central character’s ultimate motives, not rebel violence per se but far broader psychic themes of a people and its enemies, either real, imagined, or an amalgam of both.