Rae Langton

Last updated

Rae Helen Langton
Born (1961-02-14) 14 February 1961 (age 63)
Ludhiana, India
Alma mater University of Sydney
Princeton University
Spouse Richard Holton
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Analytic
Main interests
Kant, feminist philosophy, metaphysics
Notable ideas
Pornography as speech act

Rae Helen Langton, FBA (born 14 February 1961) is an Australian-British professor of philosophy. She is currently the Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on Immanuel Kant's philosophy, moral philosophy, political philosophy, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. She is also well known for her work on pornography and objectification.

Contents

Life, education and career

Langton was born in 1961 in Ludhiana, India to David Langton and his wife Valda. A carpenter and a nurse, respectively, they were at the time lay missionaries. She attended Hebron School, Coonoor and Ootacamund, India. In 1980 she moved to Australia and attended the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales. In 1981 she enrolled at the University of Sydney where she majored in philosophy. [1] There she became interested in Kant. Her Honours thesis argued that Kant's scientific realism did not fit with his idealism. [2] She graduated with First Class Honours in 1986. She was one of a group of women honours graduates at the time encouraged to continue their studies by applying to graduate school in the United States. [3] In 1986 Langton moved to the United States and began graduate work at Princeton University in the philosophy department. [1] While studying social philosophy at Princeton she became interested in the philosophical debates on free speech and pornography. [2]

In 1990, before writing her PhD thesis, Langton moved back to Australia. From 1990–98 she was a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy department of Monash University in Melbourne. [2]

Langton received her PhD in 1995 from Princeton. [1] Her thesis advisor was Margaret Dauler Wilson; [2] and her thesis topic was Kantian Humility. [4]

In 1998 Langton was a Fellow in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She moved to the United Kingdom in 1998. From 1998 to 1999 she was a lecturer at Sheffield University. From 1999 to 2004 she was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. From 2004 to 2013 she was back in the United States as a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [1]

In 2012 she was one of several philosophers who submitted evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics. [5]

She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in October 2013. [6]

In 2013 she joined the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and became a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. In 2014, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. [7] She gave the John Locke Lectures on 'Accommodating Injustice' at Oxford University in 2015. [1]

In 2017 she was appointed to the Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, the first woman to hold this professorship. [8]

She is married to fellow philosopher Richard Holton. [1]

Philosophical work

In 1990, in response to Ronald Dworkin's Is There a Right to Pornography?, [9] Langton published Whose right? Ronald Dworkin, Women, and Pornographers. [10] In it she argued that the positions Dworkin takes on segregation and affirmative action are not consistent with his position in defence of pornography. [11] The paper was voted one of the ten best articles in philosophy that year. [12] In 1993 she published her paper Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts. [13]

According to Mary Kate McGowan, "Rather than focus on the harms allegedly caused, Langton explores the hypothesis that pornography actually constitutes harm." [14]

Her first book, Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves, [15] is based on her thesis. According to one reviewer, "In this perspective there is no idealism in Kant, rather what Langton calls epistemic humility." [16] Another reviewer described the book as "one of the most original and thought-provoking books on Kant to have appeared for quite some time." [17]

Many of the papers she published from 1990–99 were collected in her 2009 book, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, along with her responses to some of her critics. [18] Regarding this book, Wellesley College philosophy professor Mary Kate McGowan wrote in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews that "...Langton's crisp, clear, and careful argumentation proves that philosophy has much to offer the socially, politically and even legally charged issues addressed here... This is feminist scholarship at its very best. It's first-rate philosophy." [14] Langton has written more than fifty articles about subjects ranging from feminist approaches to pornography, to animal ethics, to hate speech. [1]

Awards and honours

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christine Korsgaard</span> American philosopher

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronald Dworkin</span> American legal philosopher (1931–2013)

Ronald Myles Dworkin was an American legal philosopher, jurist, and scholar of United States constitutional law. At the time of his death, he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. Dworkin had taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, where he was the Professor of Jurisprudence, successor to philosopher H. L. A. Hart.

In social philosophy, objectification is the act of treating a person as an object or a thing. It is part of dehumanization, the act of disavowing the humanity of others. Sexual objectification, the act of treating a person as a mere object of sexual desire, is a subset of objectification, as is self-objectification, the objectification of one's self. In Marxism, the objectification of social relationships is discussed as "reification".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Onora O'Neill</span> British philosopher & college principal

Onora Sylvia O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, is a British philosopher and a crossbench member of the House of Lords.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernard Williams</span> English moral philosopher (1929–2003)

Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams, FBA was an English moral philosopher. His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). He was knighted in 1999.

The Knightbridge Professorship of Philosophy is the senior professorship in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. There have been 22 Knightbridge professors, the incumbent being Rae Langton.

Jennifer Hornsby, FBA is a British philosopher with interests in the philosophies of mind, action, language, as well as feminist philosophy. She is currently a professor at the School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London. She is well known for her opposition to orthodoxy in current analytic philosophy of mind, and for her use of J. L. Austin's Speech Act Theory to look at the effects of pornography.

The Anti-pornography Civil Rights Ordinance is a name for several proposed local ordinances in the United States and that was closely associated with the anti-pornography radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon. It proposed to treat pornography as a violation of women's civil rights and to allow women harmed by pornography to seek damages through lawsuits in civil courts. The approach was distinguished from traditional obscenity law, which attempts to suppress pornography through the use of prior restraint and criminal penalties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge</span>

The University of Cambridge was the birthplace of the 'Analytic' School of Philosophy in the early 20th century. The department is located in the Raised Faculty Building on the Sidgwick Site and is part of the Cambridge School of Arts and Humanities. The Faculty achieved the best possible results from The Times 2004 and the QAA Subject Review 2001 (24/24). In the UK as of 2020, it is ranked second by the Guardian, second by the Philosophical Gourmet Report, and fifth by the QS World University Rankings.

David Andrew Bell is a British philosopher. He is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield, He studied in Dublin, Göttingen and Canada, and is best known for his work on the philosophers Gottlob Frege, Immanuel Kant, and Edmund Husserl, and also on topics such as solipsism, phenomenology, the theory of thought and judgement, and the history of the Analytic Tradition.

Feminist views on pornography range from total condemnation of the medium as an inherent form of violence against women to an embracing of some forms as a medium of feminist expression. This debate reflects larger concerns surrounding feminist views on sexuality, and is closely related to those on prostitution, BDSM, and other issues. Pornography has been one of the most divisive issues in feminism, particularly in Anglophone (English-speaking) countries. This division was exemplified in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s, which pitted anti-pornography activists against pro-pornography ones.

<i>Only Words</i> (book)

Only Words is a 1993 book by Catharine MacKinnon. In this work of feminist legal theory, MacKinnon contends that the U.S. legal system has used a First Amendment basis to protect intimidation, subordination, terrorism, and discrimination as enacted through pornography, violating the equal protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Jennifer Mather Saul is a philosopher working in philosophy of language and philosophy of feminism. Saul is a professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield and the University of Waterloo.

Patricia W. Kitcher is the Roberta and William Campbell Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, widely known for her work on Immanuel Kant and on philosophy of psychology. She has held many positions at different universities, is a founding chair of a committee at the University of California, and has a lead role in multiple professional organizations. Kitcher's most notable interests throughout her career regard cognition and Kantian ethics. She is the author of multiple papers and two books.

Marcia Baron is an American philosopher and the Rudy Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. Her main research interests include moral philosophy, moral psychology, and philosophical issues in criminal law. Baron is an associate editor of Inquiry, a member of the editorial board of The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, a series editor for New Directions in Ethics, and a member of the editorial board of the North American Kant Studies in Philosophy.

Béatrice Longuenesse is a French philosopher and academic, who is the Silver Professor of Philosophy Emerita at New York University. Her work focuses on Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the philosophy of mind. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Longuenesse is one of the most prominent living Kant scholars, and her works have generated significant discussion around parts of Kant's corpus that were previously largely overlooked.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Herman</span> American philosopher (born 1945)

Barbara Herman is the Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Philosophy. A well-known interpreter of Kant's ethics, Herman works on moral philosophy, the history of ethics, and social and political philosophy. Among her many honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985-1986) and election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1995).

In the philosophy of science, epistemic humility refers to a posture of scientific observation rooted in the recognition that (a) knowledge of the world is always interpreted, structured, and filtered by the observer, and that, as such, (b) scientific pronouncements must be built on the recognition of observation's inability to grasp the world in itself. The concept is frequently attributed to the traditions of German idealism, particularly the work of Immanuel Kant, and to British empiricism, including the writing of David Hume. Other histories of the concept trace its origin to the humility theory of wisdom attributed to Socrates in Plato's Apology. James Van Cleve describes the Kantian version of epistemic humility–i.e. that we have no knowledge of things in their "nonrelational respects or ‘in themselves'"–as a form of causal structuralism. More recently, the term has appeared in scholarship in postcolonial theory and critical theory to describe a subject-position of openness to other ways of 'knowing' beyond epistemologies that derive from the Western tradition.

Baroness Maria Regina von Herbert was a sister of Franz Paul von Herbert, an Austrian patron and white-lead paint manufacturer. She is best known for her letters to Immanuel Kant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helga Varden</span> Norwegian-American philosopher

Helga Varden is a Norwegian-American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy and Gender and Women Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was Brady Distinguished Visiting Professor in Ethics and Civic Life at Northwestern University between 2014-2015. She is known for her works on Kantian philosophy.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Curriculum vitae – Rae Helen Langton". Academia.edu. Retrieved 20 December 2013.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Gardner, Steve (2011). "Rae Langton". In Graham Oppy; N. N. Trakakis (eds.). The Antipodean Philosopher: Volume 2. Interviews on Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. Lexington Books. pp. 85–104, 254–55. ISBN   978-0739166567.
  3. Green, Karen (2011). "Australian Women Philosophers". In Graham Robert Oppy; Nick Trakakis (eds.). The Antipodean Philosopher, Volume 1. Lexington Books. pp. 67–79. ISBN   978-0739127339.
  4. "Alumni PhDs by Last Name" (PDF). Princeton University Department of Philosophy. Retrieved 9 March 2014.
  5. Langton, Rae. "Submission from Prof. Rae Langton to the Leveson Inquiry" (PDF). Archived from the original on 10 December 2014. Retrieved 20 December 2013.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  6. Staff (24 April 2014). "Nine MIT faculty members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among 198 elected this year to the prestigious honorary society" (Press release). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 8 March 2014.
  7. "Professor Rae Langton".
  8. "Rae Langton will be the next Knightbridge Professor – Faculty of Philosophy".
  9. Dworkin, Ronald (1981). "Is There a Right to Pornography?". Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. 1 (2): 177–212. doi:10.1093/ojls/1.2.177. JSTOR   764457.
  10. Langton, Rae (1990). "Whose Right? Ronald Dworkin, Women, and Pornographers". Philosophy and Public Affairs. 19 (4): 311–59. JSTOR   2265317.
  11. Langton, Rae (1990). "Whose right? Ronald Dworkin, Women, and Pornographers". Philosophy and Public Affairs. 19 (4): 311–59. doi:10.1023/A:1010619209334. S2CID   141072264.
  12. "Past Volumes". The Philosopher's Annual. Retrieved 9 March 2014.
  13. Langton, Rae (1993). "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts". Philosophy & Public Affairs. 22 (4): 293–330. JSTOR   2265469.
  14. 1 2 McGowan, Mary Kate (June 2009). "Review: Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification". Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
  15. Rae, Langton (2004). Kantian humility our ignorance of things in themselves. Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN   978-0198236535. OCLC   177345495.
  16. Esfeld, Michael (2001). "Rae Langton, Kantian Humility. Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves". Erkenntnis. 54 (3): 399–403. doi:10.1023/A:1010619209334. S2CID   141072264.
  17. Walker, Ralph (2002). "Review: Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves". Mind. 111 (441): 136–43. doi:10.1093/mind/111.441.136.
  18. Rae, Langton (2009). Sexual solipsism philosophical essays on pornography and objectification. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0199247066. OCLC   902008049.
  19. Kutchinsky, Serena (23 April 2014). "World thinkers 2014: The results". Prospect Magazine.
  20. "British Academy announces 42 new fellows". Times Higher Education. 18 July 2014. Retrieved 18 July 2014.
  21. Uppsala University. "Hägerström Lectures 2015" . Retrieved 3 December 2015.