Christine Marion Korsgaard | |
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Born | April 9, 1952 | (age 68)
Alma mater | Harvard University University of Illinois |
Era | 20th-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Analytic |
Institutions | Harvard University |
Main interests | Moral philosophy · Kantianism |
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Christine Marion Korsgaard, FBA (/ˈkɔːrzɡɑːrd/; born April 9, 1952) is an American philosopher and Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University whose 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.
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 is now Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy.
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,[2] 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[3] and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2015.[4] 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.[5]
Korsgaard is an advocate of animal rights. She was a vegetarian for over 40 years and is now a vegan.[6] In 2018, Korsgaard authored Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals which argues that Kantian ethics supports animal rights.[7]