Karen Taliaferro is Associate Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton Center. She previously taught at Arizona State University. In 2024–2025, she will be a Fulbright Fellow in Morocco, where she previously served as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Her research interests include ancient and medieval political philosophy as well as religion and politics, with a particular emphasis on Islamic thought. Her first book, The Possibility of Religious Freedom: Early Natural Law and the Abrahamic Faiths (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examined the perennial conflict of divine law and human law, proposing a re-examination of ancient and medieval traditions of natural law to mitigate the conflict.
Taliaferro’s current book project is ‘Truth Does Not Contradict Truth’: The Political Thought of Ibn Rushd, a study of the twelfth-century Andalusian Muslim philosopher and jurist Ibn Rushd. Ibn Rushd’s philosophy, along with that the falsafa tradition of Hellenistic Muslim philosophers, provides a comparative angle from which to examine our own Western intellectual heritage, commenting, as it does, on Aristotle and neo-Platonism. This book will bring together Ibn Rushd’s philosophical commentaries with his Islamic writings to articulate a Rushdian political theory.
