Paul Russell (philosopher)

Last updated

Paul Russell (born Glasgow, Scotland, 1955) is a professor in philosophy at Lund University, where he is Director of the Lund/Gothenburg Responsibility Project [LGRP]. His position at Lund is a half-time research position and has been made possible thanks to a major grant from the Swedish Research Council for "the international recruitment of leading researchers" (2014). Prior to his current position at Lund University he has held positions as Professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and at Gothenburg University.

Contents

Education and research

Paul Russell holds an undergraduate degree from Edinburgh University (1979) and a PhD from Cambridge University (1986). At Cambridge his thesis work was supervised by Professor Sir Bernard Williams. He held a research fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge from 1984 to 1987.

Apart from the positions mentioned above he has also held a number of visiting appointments at various universities, including University of Virginia (1988); Stanford University (1989–1990), where he held a Mellon Fellowship; University of Pittsburgh (1996–1997); and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2005), where he was Kenan Distinguished Visitor. In 2010 he was the Fowler Hamilton Visiting Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford [1] and in 2023 he was Beaufort Visiting Fellow at St. John's College, Cambridge.

His principal research interests include problems of free will and moral responsibility and the history of early modern philosophy (particularly David Hume).

He is the author of Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility (1995), The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (2008), The Limits of Free Will: Selected Essays (2017), and Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy: Selected Essays, all published by Oxford University Press. His book The Riddle of Hume's Treatise won the book prize from the Journal of the History of Philosophy in 2008, a prize bestowed on "the best published book in the history of philosophy." [2] [3] He has served on the editorial board of the journals Hume Studies and Journal of the History of Philosophy.

Along with his academic publications he has also published opinion pieces and reviews in a variety of venues including, The Globe and Mail , the Vancouver Sun , the Times Literary Supplement , The Scotsman , and Aeon . Selections of his work have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Polish, Italian and Hungarian.

In recent years Paul Russell has commented on and discussed issues relating to free speech on the university campus, [4] [5] including at the University of British Columbia. [6] [7] [8]

Awards

Works

Books

Books Introduced and Edited

Wrote Introductions For


Further reading


Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Hume</span> Scottish philosopher (1711–1776)

David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiricist.

Skepticism, also spelled scepticism in British English, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma. For example, if a person is skeptical about claims made by their government about an ongoing war then the person doubts that these claims are accurate. In such cases, skeptics normally recommend not disbelief but suspension of belief, i.e. maintaining a neutral attitude that neither affirms nor denies the claim. This attitude is often motivated by the impression that the available evidence is insufficient to support the claim. Formally, skepticism is a topic of interest in philosophy, particularly epistemology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alvin Plantinga</span> American Christian philosopher

Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher who works primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, epistemology, and logic.

Philosophical skepticism is a family of philosophical views that question the possibility of knowledge. It differs from other forms of skepticism in that it even rejects very plausible knowledge claims that belong to basic common sense. Philosophical skeptics are often classified into two general categories: Those who deny all possibility of knowledge, and those who advocate for the suspension of judgment due to the inadequacy of evidence. This distinction is modeled after the differences between the Academic skeptics and the Pyrrhonian skeptics in ancient Greek philosophy. In the latter sense, skepticism is understood as a way of life that helps the practitioner achieve inner peace. Some types of philosophical skepticism reject all forms of knowledge while others limit this rejection to certain fields, for example, knowledge about moral doctrines or about the external world. Some theorists criticize philosophical skepticism based on the claim that it is a self-refuting idea since its proponents seem to claim to know that there is no knowledge. Other objections focus on its implausibility and distance from regular life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Taylor (philosopher)</span> Canadian philosopher (born 1931)

Charles Margrave Taylor is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec, and professor emeritus at McGill University best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, the history of philosophy, and intellectual history. His work has earned him the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize.

Crispin James Garth Wright is a British philosopher, who has written on neo-Fregean (neo-logicist) philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and on issues related to truth, realism, cognitivism, skepticism, knowledge, and objectivity. He is Professor of Philosophical Research at the University of Stirling, and taught previously at the University of St Andrews, University of Aberdeen, New York University, Princeton University and University of Michigan.

Galen John Strawson is a British analytic philosopher and literary critic who works primarily on philosophy of mind, metaphysics, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. He has been a consultant editor at The Times Literary Supplement for many years, and a regular book reviewer for The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Independent, the Financial Times and The Guardian. He is the son of philosopher P. F. Strawson. He holds a chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, and taught for many years before that at the University of Reading, City University of New York, and Oxford University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A. C. Ewing</span> English philosopher (1899-1973)

Alfred Cyril EwingFBA, was an English philosopher who spent most of his career at the University of Cambridge. He was a prolific writer who made contributions to Kant scholarship, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion.

Nancey Murphy is an American philosopher and theologian who is Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. She received the B.A. from Creighton University in 1973, the Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 1980, and the Th.D. from the Graduate Theological Union (theology) in 1987.

Paul Guyer is an American philosopher and a leading scholar of Immanuel Kant and of aesthetics. From 2012, he was Jonathan Nelson Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Brown University until his retirement.

Mario De Caro is an Italian philosopher, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Rome III in Italy. Since 2000, he has also been teaching at Tufts University, where he is regularly a visiting professor. He is interested in moral philosophy, the free-will controversy, theory of action, history of science, Donald Davidson's and Hilary Putnam's philosophies, and early modern philosophy. With David Macarthur, he has defended a metaphilosohical view called liberal naturalism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geoffrey Sayre-McCord</span> American philosopher

Geoffrey Sayre-McCord is an American philosopher who works in moral theory, ethics, meta-ethics, the history of ethics and epistemology. He teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also the director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bo Rothstein</span> Swedish political scientist

Bo Abraham Mendel Rothstein is a Swedish political scientist. He currently holds the August Röhss Chair in Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, and is a former Professor of Government and Public Policy at the University of Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barry Stroud</span> Canadian philosopher (1935–2019)

Barry Stroud was a Canadian philosopher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Known especially for his work on philosophical skepticism, he wrote about David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the metaphysics of color, and many other topics.

Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atheism during the Age of Enlightenment</span>

Atheism, as defined by the entry in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, is "the opinion of those who deny the existence of a God in the world. The simple ignorance of God doesn't constitute atheism. To be charged with the odious title of atheism one must have the notion of God and reject it." In the period of the Enlightenment, avowed and open atheism was made possible by the advance of religious toleration, but was also far from encouraged.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">British philosophy</span> Philosophical tradition of the British people

British philosophy refers to the philosophical tradition of the British people. "The native characteristics of British philosophy are these: common sense, dislike of complication, a strong preference for the concrete over the abstract and a certain awkward honesty of method in which an occasional pearl of poetry is embedded".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Harrison (historian)</span> Australian historian and philosopher

Peter D. Harrison is Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Australia.

William Dudgeon (1705/6–1743) was a Scottish freethinker and philosopher. A tenant farmer who resided at Lennel Hill Farm, near Coldstream, Berwickshire, he was one of several philosophers active in the borders area of Scotland during this period. Other figures in this group include Andrew Baxter, Henry Home, and most importantly David Hume.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Macarthur</span> Australian philosopher

David Macarthur is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney who works primarily on skepticism, metaphysical quietism, pragmatism, liberal naturalism and philosophy of art. He has taken up these and other themes in articles on the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

References


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.