prof. dr. F.A. (Frank) Hindriks
Frank Hindriks is a philosopher with a background in economics. He is currently head of the department of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy a the the Faculty of Philosophy. Prior to that he functioned as the director of the Center of Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) of which he is now a fellow. He has received several grants including a VENI grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
His research concerns social ontology and collective ethics has culminated in The Structure of the Open Society: Social Ontology Meets Collective Ethics (OUP, 2025). In this book. Hindriks presents a theory of society in which social groups and institutions play a central role. It explains how institutions constrain and enable, empower and disempower. He uses this theory to address issues such as identity politics, group rights, collective responsibility, structural justice, corporate responsibility and rights. And he applies it to topics such as money, gender and climate change. Currently, he is working on a contractualist account of collective responsibility as well as on structural injustice and its relation to ideal theory.
Hindriks is a member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. Furthermore, he is a founding member of the International Social Ontology Society (ISOS) and one of the founding editors of the Journal of Social Ontology (JSO), which he co-edited until 2021. He collaborates with psychologists and sociologists within the consortiums Sustainable Cooperation and Social Cohesion.
His articles have been published by journals such as Philosophical Studies, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly, Synthese and Erkenntnis. A lot of his work is interdisciplinary. This is apparent from his pubilications in specialist journals including Economics and Philosophy, Mind and Language, Philosophical Psychology, Rationality and Society, and the Journal of Institutional Economics.