Christine Marion Korsgaard | |
---|---|
Born | April 9, 1952 | (age 70)
Alma mater | Harvard University University of Illinois |
Era | 20th-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Analytic |
Institutions | Harvard University |
Main interests | Moral philosophy · Kantianism |
Influences | |
Influenced |
Christine Marion Korsgaard, FBA (/ˈkɔːrzɡɑːrd/; born April 9, 1952) is an American philosopher who is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Harvard University. Her main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal relationships; and in normativity in general.
Education and career
Korsgaard first attended Eastern Illinois University for two years and transferred to receive a B.A. from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D from Harvard, where she was a student of John Rawls. She was awarded an honorary LHD Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Illinois in 2004.[1] She is a 1970 alumna of Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor, Ill.
She has taught at Yale, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago; since 1991 she has been a professor at Harvard University, where she was Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy, and is now emerita.[2]
In 1996 Korsgaard published a book entitled The Sources of Normativity, which was the revised version of her Tanner Lectures on Human Values, and also a collection of her past papers on Kant's moral philosophy and Kantian approaches to contemporary moral philosophy: Creating the Kingdom of Ends. In 2002, she was the first woman to give the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford,[3] which turned into her recent book, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity.
She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2001[4] and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2015.[5] She served as President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2008-2009, and held a Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award from 2006-2009.[6]
Animal rights
Korsgaard is an advocate of animal rights. She was a vegetarian for over 40 years and is now a vegan.[7] In 2018, Korsgaard authored Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals which argues that Kantian ethics supports animal rights.[8]
It is plain enough, scientifically, that human beings are not ‘incompetent’ to deal with meat. The question is whether we are ‘competent’ to be vegetarians or vegans, and that seems obvious as well. Like many, I would say that if we can be vegans, we should.[9]
Selected publications
Books
- (2018) Fellow Creatures: Our obligations to other animals, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0198753858.
- (2009) Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity, Oxford University Press.
- (2008) The Constitution of Agency, Oxford University Press.
- (1996a) The Sources of Normativity, New York: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-55059-9.
- (1996b) Creating the Kingdom of Ends, New York: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-49644-6.
Articles
- (1986) "Skepticism about Practical Reason," The Journal of Philosophy 83 (1): 5-25. (Reprinted in as ch.11 in Korsgaard (1996b), pp. 311–334.)
- (1997) "The Normativity of Instrumental Reason", ch. 8 in Garrett Cullity & Berys Gaut (eds.) Ethics and Practical Reason, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 215–54. (Reprinted with Afterword in Korsgaard (2008), pp. 27–69.)
See also
Notes
- ^ "Honors and Awards | Commencement at Illinois". Archived from the original on 2019-01-05. Retrieved 2015-06-04.
- ^ "Faculty".
- ^ "Past Lectures - Faculty of Philosophy". Archived from the original on 2011-07-20. Retrieved 2014-12-19.
- ^ "Harvard Gazette: American Academy of Arts and Sciences announces fellows". news.harvard.edu. Archived from the original on 2002-01-09.
- ^ "British Academy | Elections to the Fellowship - British Academy". Archived from the original on 2015-07-21. Retrieved 2015-07-19.
- ^ "Index". www.people.fas.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2018-05-16.
- ^ "Book presents the case that animals are just as important as people". Phys.org. Retrieved October 8, 2020.
- ^ Nobis, Nathan (2019). "Review: Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals". The Philosophers' Magazine. 87: 113–114. doi:10.5840/tpm201987100. S2CID 213858580.
- ^ Madenholm, Terry (25 January 2022). "The Surprising History of Vegetarianism". Haaretz.
External links
- Korsgaard's Web Page - at Harvard University.
- Interview with 3AM Magazine