David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, since September 2012. He is a recipient of the prestigious Ramón y Cajal grant (with a five-year duration, from 2017 to 2021), awarded by the Spanish government to support outstanding research activities.
Prior to his appointment to the University of Navarra, he held several research and teaching positions in the United States, including visiting assistant professor at Bucknell and Villanova, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Princeton University’s James Madison Program. Dr Thunder earned his BA and MA in philosophy at University College Dublin, and his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Notre Dame.
His research attempts to come to a deeper understanding of the lived experience of persons who seek to live meaningful and worthy lives in community with others. One of the defining features of his work is its attempt to recover a more wholistic vision of the human person and of community life, in the face of attempts by modern thinkers to isolate legal, economic, and political activity from broader concerns and values that affect the human person as such.
David Thunder is author of Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and articles on a variety subjects including social responsibility, the ethics of financial trading, and the challenges of building community in individualistic societies. His work has appeared in prominent venues such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Theory, and The Journal of Social Philosophy. He has also published in newspapers such as The Irish Times, El Mundo and El Español.