It's a steep climb up three floors to the bare office of newly arrived Professor of Philosophy Thomas N. Scanlon, a climb perhaps symbolic of the distance many philosophers feet from the mundanities of the "real world."

"That does bother me somewhat," Scanlon says of this distance. "Sometimes I think I should give [philosophy] up and go into something concrete, like math."

But Scanlon has done quite a bit to bridge the gap between philosophical ideas and actual applications.

A longtime associate editor of the quarterly journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, Scanlon has written on such topics as the freedom of expression and privacy rights, and has editted articles on abortion and war.

His current interest, he acknowledges, it somewhat abstruse. "The thing I'm interested in is . . . what kind of force is a moral obligation," he explains. "Sitting around asking. "What would happen if I broke a promise?' is just the kind of thing that gives philosophy a bad name."

Scanlon has just written a working paper on "the role of social institutions in . . . making an agreement between two people binding."

"I'm not suggesting that this has applications on how people behave in large-scale situations," be adds. "That would be a little grandiose, to say the least."

But it could be the basis for a new contractarian philosophical system with a different base than Conant University Professor John Rawls' "original position"--the theory currently holding away over the field of political philosophy.

In other words, it could be big shakes.

"Maybe, or maybe it will just fall apart," says Department Chairman Warren D. Goldfarb '69 of his newest colleague's latest work.

"He wants to take the notion of social agreement on certain moral principles that will seem to be reasonable and extend it to a general and more comprehensive moral view," Rawis said last year on the occasion of Scanlon's acceptance.

Scanlon says he is working up to a book--on the nature of morality--which would be his first. He is one of the few tenured faculty members at Harvard not to have published a book, though he has written numerous articles.

"Publishing books is not central form of scholarly accomplishment [in philosophy] as it is in other fields of the humanities," he says.

The Philosophy Department apparently agrees; Scanlon was the end-product of a multi-year search for a specialist in political and moral philosophy, the core of the department.

"Harvard has a great tradition of a very great eminence in this field," Goldfarb says, referring to Rawls, Professor of Philosophy Robert Nozick, and Roderick Firth, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity," However, these gentlemen, with the exception of Mr. Nozick, are not getting any younger," Goldfarb adds. "There is great concern of maintaining this tradition in that subject."