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Avery Kolers

Avery Kolers

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ADDRESS

Department of Philosophy
801 McClung Tower
Knoxville, TN 37996-0480

Website

https://philpeople.org/profiles/avery-kolers

CV

Avery Kolers

Professor and Department Head

I spent 25 years at the University of Louisville before arriving in 2026 as Professor and Department Head in Philosophy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I am co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Philosophy and I serve on the editorial board of Political Philosophy.

Education

PhD, Philosophy, University of Arizona (2000)
BA, Ethics & Political Philosophy, Brown University (1995)

Research

I have longstanding research interests in issues surrounding territorial rights and solidarity. These highly applied issues touch on a wide range of problems, but also raise hard questions about how to navigate deep diversity in a shared world. More recently I have been researching the philosophy of sports and games, in order to better understand ethical behavior as embodied skill, and to articulate the kinds of sociability made possible by games, and the prospects for incorporating this sociability into everyday life.

Publications

  • “Making Harmony Safe for Democracy.” In Considering, Questioning and Re-Imagining Harmony: Multicultural, Multihistorical and Multidisciplinary Reflections, edited by Chenyang Li, Karyn Lai, and Rick Benitez. Bloomsbury, 2025.
  • “Solidarity as a Virtue of Equality.” In The Virtue of Solidarity, ed. Andrea Sangiovanni and Juri Viehoff (Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 110-136.
  • “Magnificent Utopian Games.” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport (July 2022). DOI: 10.1080/00948705.2022.2084745
  • “What Does Solidarity Do For Bioethics? Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (2021), 122-28. Online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2019-106040
  • “Groundwork for the Mechanics of Morals.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 #5 (2020): 636-51. Online: https://doi.org/10.1017/can.2020.13