Alexandra King - What We Ought and What We Can

I began thinking about this topic in a graduate seminar on ideal theory in political philosophy, so I suppose thats where the acknowledgments should begin. I am very grateful to Dave Estlund for assigning the Kant essay that set me on this path in the first place, and for encouraging my incipient thoughts on it. He has been a wonderful and kind interlocutor, but always a firm and stalwart defender of Ought Implies Can, and so an extremely useful foil for my thinking on these matters. Before I knew it, I had a dissertation.

Because this book grew out of my dissertation, or more precisely, grew out of issues present in my dissertation, I owe thanks to my friends and mentors in graduate school, who all helped me in various ways. First, I cannot thank enough my adviser, Jamie Dreier, for his support and guidance both then and now. At once my greatest champion and my greatest critic, his encouragement and critical feedback made me the philosopher I am today. I am also very grateful to Nomy Arpaly and Julia Driver who, in addition to Dave Estlund, made up the rest of my dissertation committee. They provided invaluable feedback on the formative stages of what now appears here. I also owe thanks to my dissertation buddy, Steven Yamamoto, and to everyone else throughout graduate school whose comments and discussion helped me think through these matters. I would like to extend particular thanks to Sean Aas, Derek Bowman, Sarah Chervinsky, Emma Cunningham, Phil Galligan, Dana Howard, Charles Larmore, Josh Schechter, and Tim Syme.

Shortly after I arrived at the University at Buffalo (yes, at), more commonly known as SUNY Buffalo, I was invited to spend seven months at the Australian National University. I received a research fellowship from the ANU as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project on Political Normativity and Feasibility Requirements. The project was headed by Nic Southwood and Geoff Brennan, to whom I am very grateful not only for their discussion and friendship (and occasional wine), but for inviting me to spend time at ANU in the first place, where I met many friends and continued refining the ideas contained in this book. Thank you especially to Emily McTernan, whose friendship and feedback and company during our regular Monday afternoon work sessions got me through a lot. Thanks also to Christian Barry, Sarah Hannan, Seth Lazar, RJ Leland, Matt Lindauer, Luke Roelofs, and Kai Spiekermann, and all of the usual suspects at ANU tea times and colloquia for innumerable conversations and feedback while I was working through many of these issues.

I am thankful to everyone who along the way enhanced my thinking about these issues with examples, comments on drafts, discussion, and more. Friends and colleagues worth particular mention are Amy Berg, David Braun, Ray Briggs, Mark Budolfson, Norman Dahl, Greg Frost-Arnold, Bob Kelly, Jake Monaghan, Sofia Ortiz, Doug Portmore, Lewis Powell, and Jack Woods.

I have presented various parts of the work that appears here at the Central APA Meeting in 2013, the University of Florida, Texas Christian University, the University at Buffalo, the National University of Singapore, the University of Sydney, the University of Canterbury, the Australian National University, and the Buffalo Women in Philosophy group. I also ran a graduate seminar on OIC in fall 2014. My heartfelt gratitude goes out to all of those audiences. The feedback I received in all of these places was extremely valuable. It helped develop the papers that grew out of those talks, and it helped shape this book.

I also owe special thanks to Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, who introduced me to Tony Bruce, my editor at Routledge, and who suggested that I write this book in the first place. I am very grateful to Tony for his encouragement and for his comments on the proposal and manuscript, and to Adam Johnson and Autumn Spalding at Routledge, whose patience with me has not gone unnoticed.

For improvements and feedback on the book itself, I owe most to a set of fantastic referees for Routledge. Their immensely insightful and constructive comments on the proposal and on the manuscript greatly improved the final product. I am genuinely thrilled to have received such a charitable and thoughtful set of referees.

For moral support throughout graduate school and during the past five years, Id like to thank my dear friends Danielle Sedbrook, Sheena van Leuven, Leslie Widing, and of course my parents, Chris and Marie King.

Finally, I am especially grateful to my partner, Nic Bommarito, whose support and encouragement have been immeasurable, and whose sometimes overly fierce engagement with these topics has always spurred me to better articulate my (and others) views. Its to him that I owe the greatest debt of gratitude. And I really ought to remember this, even in those moments when I cant.

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