Christine M. Korsgaard
Author of The Sources of Normativity
About the Author
Christine M. Korsgaard is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She works on moral philosophy and its history, practical reason, agency, personal identity, and the relations between human beings and the other animals.
Works by Christine M. Korsgaard
Associated Works
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Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1952
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Harvard University (Ph.D. ∙ philosophy)
University of Illinois (BA) - Occupations
- Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University
- Organizations
- Harvard University
- Relationships
- Rawls, John (teacher)
- Short biography
- Christine M. Korsgaard received her B.A. from the University of Illinois and her Ph.D. from Harvard, where she studied with John Rawls. She taught at Yale, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago before taking up her present position at Harvard, where she is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy. [adapted from Primates and Philosophers (2006)]
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- Illinois, USA
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Reviews
Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations spring from what that identity forbids. [...] For to violate them is to lose your integrity and so your identity, and to no longer be who you are. That is, it is to no longer be able to think of yourself under the description under which you value yourself and find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. It is to be for all practical purposes dead or worse than dead.
Korsgaard seeks to answer the show more "normative question": what justifies the claims that morality makes on us? In addition to addressing how and why moral ideas can have important practical and psychological effects on us, she also attempts to justify granting this kind of importance to morality. Her account is Kantian, with an emphasis on practical identity. The responses from Cohen, Nagel, Guess, and Williams fail to damage her project too much, before she provides a thorough and convincing reply in the final section of the book (the benefit of being the author of the book, I suppose). Nagel's objections seem to me the most convincing of the four, but it is worth reading The Sources of Normativity for anyone who wants to decide for themselves. show less
Korsgaard seeks to answer the show more "normative question": what justifies the claims that morality makes on us? In addition to addressing how and why moral ideas can have important practical and psychological effects on us, she also attempts to justify granting this kind of importance to morality. Her account is Kantian, with an emphasis on practical identity. The responses from Cohen, Nagel, Guess, and Williams fail to damage her project too much, before she provides a thorough and convincing reply in the final section of the book (the benefit of being the author of the book, I suppose). Nagel's objections seem to me the most convincing of the four, but it is worth reading The Sources of Normativity for anyone who wants to decide for themselves. show less
Report is that Dr. Korsgaard is a vegetarian. She IS the Faculty Advisor to Vegitas, the Harvard Vegetarian Society.
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Statistics
- Works
- 13
- Also by
- 2
- Members
- 605
- Popularity
- #41,546
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 2
- ISBNs
- 35
- Languages
- 3