Themes
I always find it hard to organize my work by theme, partly because I tend to want to build bridges between different areas, and partly because I can be a dilettante so there are a fair few one-offs. The full list appears below.
1. Democracy
I'm most interested in questions about political equality (see What is the Point of Political Equality?, One Person, One Vote, What Voting Power Cannot Be, Malapportionment: A Murder Mystery), as well as broader issues about how to fairly design electoral systems (see Which Majority Should Rule?, The Democratic Imperative to Make Margins Matter, The Expressive Case Against Plurality Rule, The Perversity of Weighted Voting). I'm currently writing a book on the one person, one vote principle. It's called "One Person, One Vote"--oddly, that name wasn't taken.
2. Discrimination
What role do discriminator's attitudes play in making acts discriminatory, and making them wrong? I explore this in a bunch of ways that challenge common commitments about the connection between discrimination and: disadvantage; social injustice; social ontology; and the justification of legal regulation. This work grew out of my earlier interest in moral objections to certain forms of linguistic social categorization (pronouns, generics).
3. The Normativity of Law
Call me old fashioned, but I'm partial to the debate about the normativity of law. I've worked on why I think it's a pseudo-problem for positivists and a real problem for some anti-positivists, what if anything it has to do with semantics, and why maybe fictionalism offers the answer. I also wrote about how to understand positivism, and its relation to legal reality.
4. Metaethical miscellany
"Miscellany" isn't a theme, but there's not really that much unity to my interests in metaethics, which might be why a recurring theme is how "unity" isn't as simple as metaethicists make it out to be (see especially Who’s on First?, which might be the only time I picked a good title). I guess beyond that, the biggest theme is the importance of explaining how morality and etiquette are both normative in some sense, while also capturing the way in which morality is essentially important and etiquette isn't. ("Morality" vs. "etiquette" here stand in for broader categories that some call "robust" vs. "merely formal" normativity.)
1. Democracy
I'm most interested in questions about political equality (see What is the Point of Political Equality?, One Person, One Vote, What Voting Power Cannot Be, Malapportionment: A Murder Mystery), as well as broader issues about how to fairly design electoral systems (see Which Majority Should Rule?, The Democratic Imperative to Make Margins Matter, The Expressive Case Against Plurality Rule, The Perversity of Weighted Voting). I'm currently writing a book on the one person, one vote principle. It's called "One Person, One Vote"--oddly, that name wasn't taken.
2. Discrimination
What role do discriminator's attitudes play in making acts discriminatory, and making them wrong? I explore this in a bunch of ways that challenge common commitments about the connection between discrimination and: disadvantage; social injustice; social ontology; and the justification of legal regulation. This work grew out of my earlier interest in moral objections to certain forms of linguistic social categorization (pronouns, generics).
3. The Normativity of Law
Call me old fashioned, but I'm partial to the debate about the normativity of law. I've worked on why I think it's a pseudo-problem for positivists and a real problem for some anti-positivists, what if anything it has to do with semantics, and why maybe fictionalism offers the answer. I also wrote about how to understand positivism, and its relation to legal reality.
4. Metaethical miscellany
"Miscellany" isn't a theme, but there's not really that much unity to my interests in metaethics, which might be why a recurring theme is how "unity" isn't as simple as metaethicists make it out to be (see especially Who’s on First?, which might be the only time I picked a good title). I guess beyond that, the biggest theme is the importance of explaining how morality and etiquette are both normative in some sense, while also capturing the way in which morality is essentially important and etiquette isn't. ("Morality" vs. "etiquette" here stand in for broader categories that some call "robust" vs. "merely formal" normativity.)
Publications
Books
Articles
- Daniel Wodak, Law's Language (Cambridge Element).
Articles
- Daniel Muñoz and Daniel Wodak, "Three Paradoxes of Duties to Self", Mind (forthcoming).
- Daniel Wodak, "Can the One-System Picture Be Systematic?", Law and Philosophy (forthcoming).
- Daniel Wodak, "What Voting Power Cannot Be", Noûs (forthcoming).
- Daniel Wodak, "Discrimination & Disadvantage", Philosophers' Imprint 26(12) (2026): 1-17.
- Garrett Cullity & Daniel Wodak, “But Thinking Makes It So: How Bad Attitudes Can Make Discriminatory Actions Wrong", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 11(3) (2025): 1081-1104.
- Daniel Wodak, "Malapportionment: A Murder Mystery", Northwestern University Law Review 120(3) (2025): 561-622.
- Daniel Wodak, "One Person, One Vote", Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 11 (2025) 32-59. [Winner of the Marc Sanders Prize for Political Philosophy 2023]
- Daniel Wodak, "What is the Point of Political Equality?", Philosophical Review (2024) 133 (4): 367–413.
- Selected for The Philosopher's Annual as one of the 10 best philosophy papers published in 2024.
- April H Bailey, Robin Dembroff, Daniel Wodak, Elif G Ikizer & Andrei Cimpian, “People’s Beliefs About Pronouns Reflect Both the Language They Speak and Their Ideologies", Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 153(5) (2024): 1388-1406.
- Daniel Wodak, "Which Majority Should Rule?", Philosophy & Public Affairs 52(2) (2024): 177-220.
- Daniel Wodak, "The Perversity of Weighted Voting", The Journal of Politics 86(2) (2024): 815-818.
- Daniel Wodak, “Regulating Speech: Harm, Norms, and Discrimination", Inquiry (2024): 1-21.
- Bart Streumer & Daniel Wodak, "Do formal objections to the error theory overgeneralize?", Analysis 83(4) (2023): 732–741.
- Keshav Singh & Daniel Wodak, “Does Race Best Explain Racial Discrimination?", Philosophers’ Imprint 23(4) (2023): 1-22.
- Daniel Wodak, "The Democratic Imperative to Make Margins Matter", Maryland Law Review 82(2) (2023): 365-442.
- David Plunkett & Daniel Wodak, "The Disunity of Legal Reality", Legal Theory (2022).
- David Plunkett & Daniel Wodak, "Legal Positivism and the Real Definition of Law", Jurisprudence (2022).
- Samuele Chilovi & Daniel Wodak, “On the (in)significance of Hume’s Law", Philosophical Studies (2022).
- Daniel Wodak, “Of Witches and White Folks", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2022).
- Bart Streumer & Daniel Wodak, “Why formal objections to the error theory fail", Analysis (2021).
- See also this response: C. Tiefensee and G. Wheeler, "Why formal objections to the error theory are sound", Analysis 82(4) 2022: 608–616
- Daniel Wodak, “Approving on the Basis of Moral and Aesthetic Testimony", Oxford Studies in Metaethics 16 (2021): 183-206. [Co-Winner of the Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics 2019]
- Daniel Wodak, “Who’s on First?", Oxford Studies in Metaethics 15 (2020): 49-71.
- Daniel Wodak, “Redundant Reasons", The Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98(2) (2020): 266-278.
- Daniel Wodak, “The Expressive Case Against Plurality Rule”, The Journal of Political Philosophy 27(3) (2019): 363-387.
- Daniel Wodak, “An Objectivist’s Guide to Subjective Reasons”, Res Philosophica 96(2) (2019): 229-244.
- Daniel Wodak, “Moral Perception, Inference, and Intuition”, Philosophical Studies 176(6) (2019): 1495-1512.
- Daniel Wodak, “What if Well-Being Measurements are Non-Linear?”, The Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97(1) (2019): 29-45.
- See also this response: C.L. Philippi, "Well-Being Measurements and the Linearity Assumption: A Response to Wodak", The Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2023).
- Daniel Wodak, “Mere Formalities: Normative Fictions and Normative Authority”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2019): 828-850.
- Robin Dembroff & Daniel Wodak, “He/She/They/Ze”, Ergo 5(14) (2018): 371-406.
- See also this Spanish translation, by Aranxa Pizarro & Eloy Neira Riquelme, in Patricia Ruiz Bravo & Aranxa Pizarro (eds), Pensando el género: lecturas contemporáneas (2023): pp. 149-169.
- Daniel Wodak, “What Does ‘Legal Obligation’ Mean?”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99(4) (2018): 790-816.
- Alex Sarch & Daniel Wodak, “Resolving Judicial Dilemmas”, Virginia Journal of Criminal Law 6(1) 2018: 93-181.
- Daniel Wodak, “Can Objectivists Account for Subjective Reasons?”, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12(3) (2017): pp. 259-279.
- Daniel Wodak, “Why Realists Must Reject Normative Quietism”, Philosophical Studies 174(11) (2017): pp. 2795-2817.
- Daniel Wodak, “Expressivism and Varieties of Normativity”, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, volume 12 (R. Shafer-Landau, ed.) (2017): pp. 265-293.
- See also this response: Toppinen, T., & Venesmaa, V. (2023). "Unified (Enough) Metasemantics for Expressivists." In P. Raatikainen (Ed.), Essays in the Philosophy of Language (Acta Philosophica Fennica; Vol. 100).
- Daniel Wodak, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Marjorie Rhodes, “What a Loaded Generalization! Generics and social cognition”, Philosophy Compass 10(9) (2015): 625-635.
- Robin Demboff & Daniel Wodak, “How Much Gender is Too Much Gender?”, Routledge Handbook in Social and Political Philosophy of Language (J. Khoo and R. Sterken eds.) (2021): 362-377.
- Daniel Wodak, “Mandatory Minimums and the War on Drugs”, in D. Boonin (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy (2018): 51-62.
- Daniel Wodak & Sarah-Jane Leslie, “The Mark of the Plural: Generic Generalizations and Race”, Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race (P.C. Taylor, L.M. Alcoff and L. Anderson Jr., eds.) (2017): pp. 277-289.
- Daniel Wodak, "Quietism", in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, D. Copp and C. Rosati (eds.), Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
- Daniel Wodak," The Semantics of ‘Legal Obligation’", Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Theory and Philosophy (J. Linarelli ed.), Edward Elgar Publishing (forthcoming).
- Daniel Wodak, “The Nature and Value of Vagueness in Law”, Ethics 131(4) (2021): 777-781.
