Emerson Bodde

Affiliated Scholar
Clemson University
Email: [email protected]
Website: Personal / faculty page
Biography
Dr. Emerson Bodde received his B.A. in Philosophy and History from Case Western Reserve University in 2016 and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 2023, and has served as a Lecturer in Philosophy at Clemson University since 2023. His research interests revolve around the history of political philosophy and the development of socio-political concepts, with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. His recent work is focused on how social class ought to be defined in philosophy in light of the recent trends in the social criticism of capitalism, theories of social identity and intersectionality, and a relative absence of clarity about the notion of class in theories of justice, social ontology, and intersectional identities. He has published articles in venues including Philosophy & Social Criticism, Transactions of the Charles Pierce Society, Asian Philosophy, Journal of Spinoza Studies, Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, and an edited volume, New Perspectives on the Ontology of Social Identities. He is currently working on papers dealing with the epistemic dimensions of democracy and authoritarianism, the lacuna of caste in theories of social criticism and in North America, and the international intellectual exchanges of political-philosophical ideas in the Interwar Era which implicitly frame contemporary political thinking.
Selected publications
- Article · 2026 The Ontic Injustice of Social Class: Towards an Anthropological Critique The Journal of Ethics Extends the idea of ontic injustice to social class.
- Article · 2026 Aesthetic form, authorship, and discrimination: can video games be classist? Synthese Argues that video games with paid in-game advantages can discriminate by class through their very form.
- Article · 2025 The Facilitator Problem: Politicizing Epistemic‐Democratic Assumptions in the People's Republic of China Philosophy & Public Affairs How deliberation facilitators shape outcomes, and why this matters especially in the People's Republic of China.
- Article · 2024 A Decolonial Spinoza: An Interpretation in Tension Journal of Spinoza Studies Argues that Spinoza can be read as a decolonial thinker.
- Article · 2022 Apocalyptic claims and the everyday: Tosaka Jun, history, and journalism Asian Philosophy
Links go to the publisher's page. See all AGPT scholars' work in the Scholars' library.