Christine Marion Korsgaard | |
|---|---|
Korsgaard in 2010 | |
| 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.
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]
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]
