The Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford was founded in 2001. It is part of Oxford's Humanities Division. [1] The faculty is located next to Somerville College on Woodstock Road. As of 2020, it is ranked 1st in the UK and 2nd in the English-speaking world by the Philosophical Gourmet Report , as well as 2nd in the world by the QS World University Rankings. [2] [3] It is additionally ranked first in the UK by the Complete University Guide, the Guardian, the Times, and the Independent. [4] [5] [6] [7]
The present-day Faculty was formerly a sub-faculty of the Faculty of Literae Humaniores (founded in 1913), though the teaching of philosophy at Oxford dates back to medieval times. The Faculty boasts over 50 full-time philosophers in permanent posts, with at least another 50 fixed-term, emeritus and associate members. [8] Today, it is housed within Oxford's Humanities Division.[ citation needed ]
Some of the world's greatest philosophers have studied (and taught) at Oxford, including Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, William of Ockham, John Wycliffe, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Norris, Jeremy Bentham, Henry Longueville Mansel, Thomas Hill Green, F. H. Bradley, Edward Caird and in more recent times Peter Strawson, A.J. Ayer, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Nagel, Gilbert Ryle, Genevieve Lloyd, Isaiah Berlin, J. L. Austin, Celia Green, Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, Michael A. Smith, Onora O'Neill, Michael Dummett, Derek Parfit, and Elizabeth Anscombe.
A number of eminent philosophers have also taught at Oxford, including Robert Grosseteste, Amartya Sen, and still others, including Noam Chomsky, Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam have come to Oxford to deliver the John Locke Lectures, [9] the Gareth Evans Memorial Lectures and other established lectures and lecture series.
The Faculty has the following statutory professorships in philosophy:
The Henry Wilde Prize in Philosophy is awarded annually annually for an outstanding performance in Philosophy. [11]
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The Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics was founded in 2003 by Eiji Uehiro, with the intention to "encourage and support debate and deeper rational reflection" on practical ethics. Annually, it hosts the Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics, a series of three lectures. [12] The centre works to raise public awareness and engagement with ethical issues, through public lecturing and engagement, commenting and consulting in the media, in the United Kingdom and internationally. [13] It is affiliated with the charities 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can. [14] The director of the centre is Julian Savulescu. [15]
The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) was founded in 2005 to "assess how dangerous AI and other potential threats might be to the human species". [16]
The Global Priorities Institute was founded in 2018, to investigate the question of "how to do the most good". [17]
Christine Marion Korsgaard, 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.
Philippa Ruth Foot was an English philosopher and one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics. Her work was inspired by Aristotelian ethics. Along with Judith Jarvis Thomson, she is credited with inventing the trolley problem. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. She was a granddaughter of the U.S. President Grover Cleveland.
Janet Radcliffe Richards is a British philosopher specialising in bioethics and feminism and Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Sceptical Feminist (1980), Philosophical Problems of Equality (1995), Human Nature after Darwin (2000), and The Ethics of Transplants (2012).
Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock, was an English philosopher of morality, education, and mind, and a writer on existentialism. She is best known for chairing an inquiry whose report formed the basis of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. She served as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge from 1984 to 1991.
Sir Geoffrey James Warnock was an English philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Before his knighthood, he was commonly known as G. J. Warnock.
Jonathan Glover is a British philosopher known for his books and studies on ethics. He currently teaches ethics at King's College London. Glover is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution in the United States, and is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
Julian Savulescu is an Australian philosopher and bioethicist of Romanian origins. He is Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor in Medical Ethics and director of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at National University of Singapore. He was previously Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and co-director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities. He is visiting professorial fellow in Biomedical Ethics at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and distinguished visiting professor in law at Melbourne University since 2017. He directs the Biomedical Ethics Research Group and is a member of the Centre for Ethics of Pediatric Genomics in Australia. He is a former editor and current board member of the Journal of Medical Ethics, which is ranked as the No.2 journal in bioethics worldwide by Google Scholar Metrics, as of 2022. In addition to his background in applied ethics and philosophy, he also has a background in medicine and neuroscience and completed his MBBS (Hons) and BMedSc at Monash University, graduating top of his class with 18 of 19 final year prizes in Medicine. He edits the Oxford University Press book series, the Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics.
The Journal of Philosophy is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal on philosophy, founded in 1904 at Columbia University. Its stated purpose is "To publish philosophical articles of current interest and encourage the interchange of ideas, especially the exploration of the borderline between philosophy and other disciplines." Subscriptions and online access are managed by the Philosophy Documentation Center.
The Centre for Human Bioethics is the previous name of a research and teaching centre at Monash University, based in the Faculty of Arts. The Centre is now known as the Monash Bioethics Centre. It focusses on the branch of ethics known as bioethics, a field relating to biological science and medicine. It was founded in October 1980 by Professors Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse, as the first centre in Australia devoted to bioethics, and one of the first in the world.
Allen Edward Buchanan is a moral, political and legal philosopher. As of 2022, he held multiple academic positions: Laureate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford University, Visiting Professor of the philosophy of international law at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College, London, and James B. Duke Professor Emeritus at Duke University.
Frances Myrna Kamm is an American philosopher specializing in normative and applied ethics. Kamm is currently the Henry Rutgers University Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is also the Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy Emerita at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, as well as Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at New York University.
Cecil Anthony John Coady, more commonly publishing as C. A. J. Coady and less formally known as Tony Coady, is a prominent Australian philosopher with an international reputation for his research, particularly in epistemology but also in political and applied philosophy. Coady's best-known work relates to the epistemological problems posed by testimony, most fully expounded in his book Testimony: a Philosophical Study. It was influential in establishing a new branch of inquiry within the field of epistemology. He is also well known for his publications on issues related to political violence. Coady is a regular commentator in the Australian media on philosophical aspects of public affairs.
The Wilde Professorship of Mental Philosophy is a chair in philosophy at the University of Oxford. Its holder is elected to a Fellowship of Corpus Christi College.
Roger Stephen Crisp is fellow and tutor in philosophy at St. Anne's College, Oxford. He holds the university posts of Professor of Moral Philosophy and Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy. His work falls principally within the field of ethics, in particular metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. In addition, he is chairman of the Management Committee of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
John Tasioulas is a Greek-Australian moral and legal philosopher. He is the inaugural Director of the Institute for Ethics in AI, and Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. He holds dual Australian and British citizenship.
Ruth Chang is an American legal scholar who serves as the Professor and Chair of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford, a Professorial Fellow of University College, Oxford, and an American professor of philosophy. She was previously a professor at Rutgers University from 1998 to 2019. She is known for her research on the incommensurability of values and on practical reason and normativity. She is also widely known for her work on decision-making and is lecturer or consultant on choice at institutions ranging from video-gaming to pharmaceuticals, the U.S. Navy, World Bank, and CIA.
Bart Schultz is an American philosopher who is Senior Lecturer in Humanities (Philosophy) and Director of the Civic Knowledge Project at the University of Chicago.
The Sekyra Foundation is a private foundation created in 2018 by Czech entrepreneur Luděk Sekyra in support of moral universalism, liberal values, and civil society. Among many other projects the Foundation has a long-term cooperation with the University of Oxford which has also named the oldest statutory professorship in philosophy at Oxford after the foundations founder Luděk Sekyra.
Brian David Earp is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and interdisciplinary researcher. He is best known for his writings on intersex medical interventions, circumcision, and drug use in the United States. He is currently associate director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University and The Hastings Center, and a Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
Eiji Uehiro was a Japanese ethicist and writer who established the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education in 1987, which later became a partner of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. The foundation was inspired by his father, Tetsuhiko Uehiro, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, whose experiences led him to forming a traditional ethics organization in Japan, which Uehiro considered not to have a universal or international enough focus. In 2002, he established the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford; a year later, this led to the formation of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.