Philip Pettit facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Philip Pettit
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Philip Noel Pettit
1945 (age 78–79) Ballygar, Ireland
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| Alma mater | Maynooth College Queen's University, Belfast |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Civic republicanism |
| Institutions | Australian National University Princeton University |
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Main interests
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Political philosophy |
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Influenced
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Philip Noel Pettit AC (born 1945) is an Irish philosopher and political theorist. He is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and also Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University.
Education and career
Pettit was educated at Garbally College, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (BA, LPh, MA) and Queen's University, Belfast (PhD).
He has been a lecturer at University College, Dublin, a research fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and professor at the University of Bradford. He was for many years professorial fellow in social and political theory at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University before becoming a visiting professor of philosophy at Columbia University for five years, then moving to Princeton.
He is the recipient of numerous honours, including an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland. He was keynote speaker at Graduate Conference, University of Toronto.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2013. He has also been a Guggenheim Fellow.
Philosophical work
Pettit defends a version of civic republicanism in political philosophy. His book Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government provided the underlying justification for political reforms in Spain under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Pettit detailed his relationship with Zapatero in his A Political Philosophy in Public Life: Civic Republicanism in Zapatero's Spain, co-authored with José Luis Martí.
Pettit holds that the lessons learned when thinking about problems in one area of philosophy often constitute ready-made solutions to problems faced in completely different areas. Views he defends in philosophy of mind give rise to the solutions he offers to problems in metaphysics about the nature of free will, and to problems in the philosophy of the social sciences, and these in turn give rise to the solutions he provides to problems in moral philosophy and political philosophy. His corpus as a whole was the subject of a series of critical essays published in Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Affiliations and honours
- Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009)
- Honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy (2010)
- Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (2013)
- Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (1987)
- Member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS
- Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in the 2017 Queen's Birthday Honours (Australia)
