Faculty
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K. Anthony Appiah
Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human ValuesKwame Anthony Appiah has published widely in philosophy and in African and African American literary and cultural studies. In 1992, Oxford University Press published In My Father’s House, which deals, in part, with the role of African and African American intellectuals in shaping contemporary African cultural life. His major current work has to do with the relationships between philosophical ethics and other disciplines. In 1996, he published Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race with Amy Gutmann; in 1997, the Dictionary of Global Culture, coedited with Henry Louis Gates Jr. Along with Gates, he has also edited the Encarta Africana cd-rom encyclopedia, published by Microsoft, which developed into Oxford University Press’s five-volume Africana encyclopedia in book form. In 2003, he coauthored Bu Me Bé: Proverbs of the Akan (of which his mother is the major author), an annotated edition of 7,500 proverbs in Twi, the language of Asante. He is also the author of three novels, of which the first, Avenging Angel, was largely set at Clare College, Cambridge, where he received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. His recent books include Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (2004), The Ethics of Identity (2005), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), Experiments in Ethics (2008), and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happens (2010).
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Charles R. Beitz
Director of the University Center for Human Values, Edwards S. Sanford Professor of PoliticsCharles Beitz’s philosophical and teaching interests focus on international political theory, democratic theory, contemporary theories of justice and the theory of human rights. His most recent book is The Idea of Human Rights (2009). He has also written Political Theory and International Relations (rev. ed. 1999) and Political Equality: An Essay in Democratic Theory (1989) as well as articles on a variety of topics in political philosophy. His co-edited volumes include International Ethics, Law, Economics, and Philosophy and, most recently, Global Basic Rights. In 2009 he completed a ten-year term as editor of Philosophy and Public Affairs. Before coming to Princeton in 2001, he taught at Swarthmore College and Bowdoin College, where he was also Dean for Academic Affairs. He has received fellowship awards from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundations, the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Council on Education and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Beitz earned a bachelor's degree from Colgate University and a Ph.D. in Princeton's Program in Political Philosophy.
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Peter Brooks
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar and Lecturer with the rank of Professor in Comparative Literature and the University Center for Human ValuesPeter Brooks, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar at Princeton, directs a university-wide seminar open to students and faculty entitled "The Ethics of Reading and the Cultures of Professionalism." Brooks is also the Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Yale University, where he began teaching in 1965. He was the founding director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale and has published on narrative and narrative theory, the 19th and 20th century novel - mainly French and English - and, more recently, on the interrelations of law and literature. He is the author of several books, including Henry James Goes to Paris (2007), Realist Vision (2005), Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000), Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994), Body Work (1993), Reading for the Plot (1984), The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) and The Novel of Worldliness (1969). He is also the author of one novel, World Elsewhere (1999). He co-edited, with Paul Gewirtz, Law’s Stories (1996) and, with Alex Woloch, Whose Freud? (2000). He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Comparative Literature and Yale Journal of Law & Humanities. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, London Review of Books, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Yale Law Journal, and elsewhere. Brooks has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of Texas - Austin, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Bologna, and the Georgetown University Law Center, and as visiting lecturer at Yale Law School. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School in 1994. During the 2001-2002 academic year, he served as Eastman Professor at Oxford University, and fellow of Balliol College. He was University Professor at the University of Virginia from 2003 to 2006, teaching in the English Department and the Law School, where he founded the Program in Law and Humanities.
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Christopher Eisgruber
Provost, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human ValuesChristopher Eisgruber became provost of Princeton University in July 2004. His research focuses on constitutional theory, the Supreme Court, religious freedom, and civil liberties. He is the author of The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process (2007), Religious Freedom and the Constitution (2007) (coauthored with Lawrence G. Sager), and Constitutional Self-Government (2001). In 2005, he coedited (with Andras Sajo) a volume of papers on universalism, human rights, and local justice titled Global Justice and the Bulwarks of Localism: Human Rights in Context (2005). He has also published widely in leading law journals. Before coming to Princeton, Eisgruber taught for 10 years on the faculty of the New York University School of Law.
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Marc Fleurbaey
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human ValuesMarc Fleurbaey is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values. He has been an economist at INSEE (Paris), a professor of economics at the Universities of Cergy-Pontoise and Pau (France), and a research director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. He has also been a Lachmann Fellow and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, a research associate at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE, Louvain-la-Neuve) and the Institute for Public Economics (IDEP, Marseilles), and a visiting researcher at Oxford. He is a former editor of the journal Economics and Philosophy and as of 2012 is the coordinating editor of Social Choice and Welfare. He is the author of Fairness, Responsibility, and Welfare (2008), a co-author of A Theory of Fairness and Social Welfare (with François Maniquet, 2011), and the coeditor of several books, including Justice, Political Liberalism, and Utilitarianism: Themes from Harsanyi and Rawls (with Maurice Salles and John Weymark, 2008). His research on normative and public economics and theories of distributive justice has focused in particular on the analysis of equality of opportunity and responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism and on seeking solutions to famous impossibilities of social choice theory.
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Elizabeth Harman
Associate Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, Laurance S. Rockefeller University PreceptorElizabeth Harman, Associate Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, works in ethics. Her papers include "Creation Ethics: The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of Abortion" (Philosophy and Public Affairs), "The Potentiality Problem" (Philosophical Studies), "Can We Harm and Benefit in Creating?" (Philosophical Perspectives), "Harming as Causing Harm" (in Harming Future Persons), and "'I'll Be Glad I Did It' Reasoning and the Significance of Future Desires" (Philosophical Perspectives).
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Nannerl O. Keohane
Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human ValuesNannerl Keohane, the former president of Duke University and Wellesley College, is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a Fellow of Harvard College. Keohane specializes in political philosophy and is the author of Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment and coeditor of Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology. Her most recent book is Higher Ground: Ethics and Leadership in the Modern University. She has published essays in several leading scholarly journals and is working on a book on leadership. She has previously taught at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Swarthmore College, as well as Wellesley and Duke.
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Erika A. Kiss
Associate Research Scholar, Director of the University Center for Human Values Film ForumErika Kiss is an associate research scholar in the University Center for Human Values and the director of its Film Forum. She regularly teaches in the Program of Freshman Seminars and, each year alternately, in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in European Cultural Studies. She has studied history and literature in Hungary (B.A., M.A.) and comparative literature at Harvard University (M.A., Ph.D.). She was a member of the Department of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. She is a co-founder of Germany's first English-language liberal arts college, the European College of Liberal Arts (ECLA) in Berlin, and served for a year as its CEO. As ECLA's first dean of academic affairs, she developed a year-long interdisciplinary curriculum in intellectual history and the liberal arts and supervised its implementation. Her research and teaching interests include the connection between the civic and the aesthetic arts of rhetoric, poetics, dramaturgy (literary and cinematic), and the philosophy of education. Currently, she is completing a book that explores the crisis of higher education in the West. She is the founding director of the University Center for Human Values Film Forum, which features weekly film screenings that are open to the community, followed by faculty-led discussions.
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Stephen Macedo
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human ValuesStephen Macedo writes and teaches on political theory, ethics, public policy, and law, especially on topics related to liberalism, democracy and citizenship, diversity and civic education, religion and politics, and the family and sexuality. His current research concerns immigration and social justice, constitutional democracy in the US, and democracy and international institutions. From 2001-2009, he was director of the University Center for Human Values. As founding director of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs (1999-2001), he chaired the Princeton Project on Universal Jurisdiction, helped formulate the Princeton Principles on Universal Jurisdiction, and edited Universal Jurisdiction: International Courts and the Prosecution of Serious Crimes Under International Law (2004). As vice president of the American Political Science Association, he was first chair of its standing committee on Civic Education and Engagement and principal co-author of Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation, and What We Can Do About It (2005). His other books include Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (2000); and Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (1990). He is co-author and co-editor of American Constitutional Interpretation, with W. F. Murphy, J. E. Fleming, and S. A. Barber (2008).
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Victoria McGeer
Research Scholar, University Center for Human ValuesPhone (609) 258-0167
Fax (609) 258-1285
Email vmcgeer@princeton.edu
Website http://www.princeton.edu/~vmcgeer
Location Room 104, 5 Ivy Lane
Victoria McGeer is a research scholar in the University Center for Human Values, with lecturing responsibilities in the Department of Philosophy. In 1993, as an assistant professor in the philosophy department at Vanderbilt University, she won the Royal Society of Canada’s Alice Wilson Award for postdoctoral research. With support from the Canadian government, she took special research leave to explore how developmental questions affect theoretical work in philosophy of mind and moral psychology, and spent two years at the lab of developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik at the University of California, Berkeley. After leaving Vanderbilt in 1998 to pursue an interdisciplinary research program on the development of social cognition and its disorders, she became a senior member of the McDonnell Project in Philosophy and the Neurosciences in 2001. She has published a number of papers in prestigious journals that reflect her wide range of interests, encompassing topics in moral psychology, the development of agential capacities and its impairments (focusing especially on autism), responsibility, the nature of folk-psychological explanation, problems of self-knowledge, and the metaphysics of mind. McGeer received her A.B. in government and philosophy from Dartmouth College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto.
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Philip Pettit
Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor for Politics and the University Center for Human Values, Director of the Program in Political PhilosophyPhone (609) 258-4759
Fax (609) 258-2729
Email ppettit@princeton.edu
Website http://www.princeton.edu/~ppettit/
Location 308 Marx Hall
Philip Pettit works in moral and political philosophy and on background issues in philosophical psychology and social ontology. His recent single-authored books include The Common Mind (1996), Republicanism (1997), A Theory of Freedom (2001), Rules, Reasons, and Norms (2002) and Made with Words: Hobbes on Mind, Society, and Politics (2008). He is the coauthor of The Economy of Esteem (2004), with Geoffrey Brennan; and Mind, Morality, and Explanation (2004), a selection of papers with Frank Jackson and Michael Smith. Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit appeared in 2007 with Oxford University Press, edited by Michael Smith, Geoffrey Brennan, Robert Goodin, and Frank Jackson. Pettit leads the Project on Democracy and Human Values at the University Center for Human Values, which explores democratic principles and practices and fosters collaboration among normative and empirical researchers on fundamental questions of democratic governance.
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Kim Lane Scheppele
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values, Director of the Program in Law and Public AffairsKim Lane Scheppele is the director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs and faculty associate in Politics. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2005, she was the John J. O'Brien Professor of Comparative Law and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she remains a faculty fellow in the law school. Her primary field is comparative constitutional law, and she has spent much time under three different grants from the National Science Foundation studying post-communist European countries undergoing constitutional transformation. She has published extensively on this topic in law reviews and social science journals. Her forthcoming book, The International State of Emergency, examines constitutional changes around the world in the wake of 9/11. Scheppele has held elective offices in the Law and Society Association as well as in the Sociology of Law and Theory sections of the American Sociological Association.
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Peter Singer
Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human ValuesPhone (609) 258-2202
Fax (609) 258-1285
Email psinger@princeton.edu
Website http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/
Location Room 203, 5 Ivy Lane
Peter Singer first became well-known internationally after the publication of Animal Liberation (2001). His other books include: Democracy and Disobedience (1973); Practical Ethics (rev. ed. 1993); The Expanding Circle (1983); Marx (2010); Hegel (2001); The Reproduction Revolution (1984)(co-authored with Deane Wells); Should the Baby Live? (1986)(co-authored with Helga Kuhse); How Are We to Live? (1995); Rethinking Life and Death (1996); One World (2004); Pushing Time Away (2004); The President of Good and Evil (2004); The Ethics of What We Eat (1997)(co-authored with Jim Mason) and The Life You Can Save (2009). Singer holds his appointment at the Center jointly with his appointment as Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, attached to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics.
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Larry S. Temkin
Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow For Distinguished TeachingLarry S. Temkin is professor of philosophy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. The author of Inequality (1993) and many articles, Temkin has received fellowships from the Danforth Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, Harvard University's Program in Ethics and the Professions, All Souls College Oxford, the National Institutes of Health, and the Australian National University. He is also the recipient of eight major teaching awards, including Rice University’s George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching, the Nicholas Salgo Distinguished Teacher Award, the Phi Beta Kappa Outstanding Teaching Award, and Rutgers’s Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education. Temkin is currently completing the book Rethinking the Good: Moral Ideals and the Nature of Practical Reasoning (forthcoming, 2011).