Philip Pettit

Philip Pettit is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University, where he has taught political theory and philosophy since 2002. Irish by background and training, he was a lecturer in University College, Dublin, a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bradford, before moving in 1983 to the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University; there he was Professor of Social and Political Theory and Professor of Philosophy. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, and a fellow of the Australian academies in Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds honorary degrees from the National University of Ireland (Dublin), the University of Crete, Universite de Montreal, Lund University, and Queen’s University, Belfast. He is an honorary Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Belfast and at the University of Sydney, Australia.

He works in moral and political theory and on background issues in philosophical psychology and social ontology. His single-authored books include The Common Mind (Oxford UP, 1996), Republicanism (Oxford UP, 1997), A Theory of Freedom (Oxford UP, 2001), Rules, Reasons and Norms (Oxford UP, 2002), Penser en Société (PUF, Paris, 2004), and Made with Words: Hobbes on Mind, Society and Politics (PUP, 2008). He is the co-author of Economy of Esteem (Oxford UP, 2004), with Geoffrey Brennan; Mind, Morality and Explanation (Oxford UP, 2004), a selection of papers with Frank Jackson and Michael Smith; and A Political Philosophy in Public Life: Civic Republicanism in Zapatero’s Spain, with Jose Luis Marti (PUP, 2010). Group Agency: The Possibility, Design and Status of Corporate Agents, co-authored with Christian List, LSE, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. He is currently working on preparing two series of lectures for publication as books. One, presented in 2009 as the Blackwell Lectures in Philosophy, Brown University and the Hourani Lectures in Philosophy, State University at Buffalo, is entitled The Conversational Imperative: Communication, Commitment and the Moral Point of View (Wiley Blackwell, forthcoming). The other, presented in 2009 as the Albertus Magnus Lectures in Philosophy, Cologne University, and in 2010 as the Seeley Lectures in Cambridge University, is entitled On the People’s Terms: A Republican Philosophy of Democracy (Cambridge UP, forthcoming). Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit appeared from Oxford UP in 2007, edited by Geoffrey Brennan, R.E.Goodin, Frank Jackson, and Michael Smith.