I am a researcher working in ethics and political philosophy. Most of my work is motivated by the question what a commitment to democracy means for the design of economic institutions. For instance, how do basic political rights bear on what business corporations should look like? This interest has lead me to work on a variety of topics like labour rights, strikes, expropriation, and workplace democracy.
I am currently working on two main research projects. The first is concerned with developing some of the institutional details of workplace democracy. If we accept that employees should have more of a say at work, what exactly should those more democratic workplaces look like? The second is a project on political resistance, again with a particular focus on the economic sphere. If we think that economic institutions are flawed in certain ways (unjust, undemocratic, etc.), what are citizens morally permitted to do about it?
One important commitment in my pursuit of these research projects is a special concern for empirical grounding. I strive to clarify abstract normative claims through their application to real examples and through spelling out their meaning in real life, closely integrating case studies as well as results from empirical social science.
I am currently a postdoc at the Munich School of Politics and Public Policy. Until July 2025 I was a fixed-term lecturer at Utrecht University where I previously did my PhD and was part of the Corporatocracy project. I did my BA in Philosophy in Frankfurt and an interdisciplinary MA in “Ethics - Economics, Law and Politics” in Bochum. You can find my full CV here.
In case you are currently listening to me giving a talk, you can find my slides here.
You can get in touch with me via e-mail: philippstehr at posteo dot de
A Democratic Right to Political Strikes. Political Philosophy 2(2): 575-604. Link (Open Access)
Expropriation as a measure of corporate reform - learning from the Berlin initiative. European Journal of Political Theory, 24(1): 70-91. Link (Open Access)
The Boundary Problem in Workplace Democracy: Who Constitutes the Corporate Demos? Political Theory, 51(3): 507-529. Link (Open Access)
If you work on similar issues and would like to get in touch to exchange ideas, give feedback or just have a chat, please do so!
I wrote my dissertation on the democratization of business corporations. Business corporations hold an enormous amount of power towards employees, contractors, customers, and the general public without any democratic control. This runs contrary to basic democratic convictions, so the democratization of business corporations is called for. In my thesis I explore several questions related to this project of democratization. What exactly does it mean to democratize a business corporation? Who should be involved and what kinds of institutional changes are democratic? How can we develop feasible institutional proposals for democratic business corporations? What are feasible institutional proposals and what does ‘feasible’ even mean in the context of such a fundamental change to our economic infrastructure?
You can find the full PDF of my dissertation here.
Dienstpflicht von unten, www.praefaktisch.de, 2023. Link
with Savriel Dillingh: Hoe lossen we de wooncrisis op? Drie lessen uit de bedrijfsethiek, Bij Nader Inzien, 2022. Link
A Match Made in Law? On Corporations and Their Uncomfortable Fit with Democracy, The American Philosophical Association, 2021. Link
Das Berliner Volksbegehren und die politische Theorie des Unternehmens, www.praefaktisch.de, 2021. Link
In the fall term 2025/6, I will be teaching in the introduction to political theory as well as a seminar on political resistance and a seminar on the political theory of Big Tech.
In the summer term 2025 I taught a course on democratic innovations at TU Munich. In the Academic Year 2024/25 I’ve also been teaching a range of graduate and undergraduate courses in the Philosophy, PPE, and Applied Ethics programs at Utrecht. In 2022 and 2023 I have co-taught an Introduction to Political Philosophy for undergraduate PPE students at Utrecht.
From 2018 to 2020 I was a research and teaching assistant for a range of courses at Ruhr-University Bochum, including an introductory lecture on Ethics and graduate seminars on legitimacy, Kant, a Univeral Basic Income, and other topics in political philosophy.
Students can find some basic tips for studying philosophy here.
Philipp Stehr
Munich School of Politics and Public Policy
Richard-Wagner-Str. 1
80333 München
Germany