Aaron Alexander Zubia’s research uncovers how our ideas about God, nature, and human nature shape our political thought and discourse. In his first book, The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of Liberalism and the Political Imagination, Zubia focuses on Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment thinker who is arguably the greatest philosopher to have written in English. Zubia’s narrative traces the development of the Epicurean tradition, which Hume appropriated, and which supplies the philosophic framework for liberal politics. Zubia’s teaching, like his research, examines the moral and philosophic foundations of the good society and explores the beliefs that underlie conservative and revolutionary postures. Zubia teaches regularly on the American political tradition and has led an independent study on metaphysics and politics in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition.
Zubia continues to explore the philosophical revolution, led by pivotal thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, that shaped liberal political thought in the West. In his next project, he will examine the ways in which the two most prominent figures in the creation of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison and James Wilson, accepted and rejected these revolutionary philosophic principles. Thus far, Zubia has found that these American framers seem to have accepted Enlightenment political thought while rejecting Enlightenment moral thought. This tension within the American political tradition—between modern political science and classical moral philosophy—explains many of the controversies that persist in public life today.
