Timothy Sommers

Background

Tim Sommers received his BA from Michigan State University, his MA from Brown University, and his PhD from University of Iowa. Tim specializes in ethical, political, and legal philosophy. At W&M, Tim teaches ethics, applied ethics, and the philosophy of law.

Before coming to W&M, Tim taught at Georgetown University, Louisiana State University, and Pace University in addition to community colleges and Angola prison. Over the last six years, Tim has written more than seventy essays on a wide-variety of topics in philosophy for the award-winning website 3 Quarks Daily. His columns typically receive ten to twenty thousand page views.

Research Interests

Tim’s research is primarily in political philosophy and ethics.  He is currently focused on how various kinds of equality (formal, moral, and distributive) are related to justice and to more specific inequalities like gender, race, income and wealth. His article “Can There be Relational Equality Across Generations? Or at All?” appeared in Res Publica in April, 2023. He’s currently working on developing ad defending an original distributive principle he calls “Range Egalitarianism.”