Jonathan Bennett

Jonathan Bennett

Fellow: Awarded 1995
Field of Study: Philosophy

Competition: US & Canada

Syracuse University

Jonathan Bennett was born in New Zealand in 1930, and educated there and at Oxford University. He holds the Litt. D. degree from the University of Cambridge. His teaching career was mainly spent at the University of Cambridge (1956-68), Simon Fraser University (1968-70), the University of British Columbia (1970-79), and Syracuse University (1979-97).

Mr. Bennett has been the Tanner Lecturer at Brasenose College, Oxford University (1980) and the John Locke Lecturer (1992), also at Oxford. He is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1985) and of the British Academy (since 1991). He was also the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1987-88.

Among his many publications are ten monographs: Rationality (London: Routledge, 1964; re-issued Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989); Kant’s Analytic (Cambridge UP, 1966); Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes (Oxford UP, 1971); Kant’s Dialectic (Cambridge UP, 1974); Linguistic Behaviour (Cambridge UP, 1976; re-issued Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990); A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Hackett, 1984); Events and their Names (Hackett, 1988); The Act Itself (Oxford UP, 1995); Learning from Six Philosophers (Oxford UP, 2001); and A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals (Oxford UP, 2003)

Since 2003 Jonathan Bennett has been engaged in preparing versions of classic philosophical texts from the early modern period, aiming to make the works easier for students to read, while leaving intact the complexities and intellectual challenges of the arguments, doctrines, lines of thought, distinctions, and problems. These texts are made available, at no charge, at www.earlymoderntexts.com.

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