Alessandro Ferrara, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" and currently serving as President of the Italian Association for Political Philosophy, has graduated in Philosophy in Italy (1975) and later, as a Harkness Fellow, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley (1984). He has conducted post-doctoral research in Munich and Frankfurt with Jürgen Habermas as a Von Humboldt Fellow and later at Berkeley again, leading to the publication of his first book Modernity and Authenticity (1993).He serves as editorial consultant on the board of a number of journals including Constellations, Philosophy and Social Criticism and The European Journal of Philosophy, and on the Advisory Board of the series New Directions in Critical Theory at Columbia University Press. His research has consistently revolved around the formulation of an authenticity- and judgment-based account of normative validity, which by way of incorporating a post-metaphysically reconstructed version of the normativity of Kant's "reflective judgment", could be immune to anti-foundationalist objections and yet represent a viable alternative to the formalism of standard proceduralist accounts of normative validity. In Reflective Authenticity this conception of normativity is outlined in general and in Justice and Judgment is developed in the direction of a political-philosophical notion of justice. His main publications are:

• The Force of the Example. Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008.
• The Uses of Judgment, special issue of Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 34, 1-2, 2008.
• "'Political' Cosmopolitanism and Judgment", in European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 10, n. 1, 2007, pp. 491-504.
• "Europe as a special area for human hope", in Constellations, 14:3, 2007, pp. 315-331.
• "Religion und postsäkulare Vernünftigkeit", in Transit, vol. 31, 2006, pp. 5-25.
• "Multiculturalismo e interculturalità: una vera alternativa?", in F. Botturi e F. Totaro (a cura di), Universalismo ed etica pubblica, Annuario di Etica, Milano, Vita e pensiero, 2006, pp. 146-53.