Philip Pettit

Philip Pettit is an Irish philosopher and political theorist, currently L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values at Princeton University, and Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University, Canberra. Born and raised in Ireland, he was a lecturer in University College, Dublin, a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bradford, before moving in 1983 to the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, where he held a professorial position jointly in Social and Political Theory and Philosophy until 2002. Throughout his intellectual career, Pettit has devoted to studying republican visions bounded and global, studied political theory and practice, and have shaped both social discourses and social movements around the world.

Pettit works in moral and political theory, as well as the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. His recent books include The Common Mind (OUP 1996), Republicanism (OUP 1997), A Theory of Freedom (OUP 2001), Rules, Reasons and Norms (OUP 2002), Penser en société (PUF, Paris 2004), Examen a Zapatero (Temas de Hoy, Madrid 2008), Made with Words: Hobbes on Mind, Society and Politics (PUP 2008); On the People's Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (CUP 2012); Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World (W.W.Norton 2014) and The Robust Demands of the Good: Ethics with Attachment, Virtue and Respect (OUP 2015). He has also co-authored a number of interventions, such as The Economy of Esteem (OUP 2004), Mind, Morality and Explanation (OUP 2004), A Political Philosophy in Public Life: Civic Republicanism in Zapatero's Spain (PUP 2010), and Group Agency: The Possibility, Design and Status of Corporate Agents (OUP 2011). He gave the Tanner lectures on Human Values at Berkeley in April 2015, which appeared in late 2018 as The Birth of Ethics: A Reconstruction of the Nature and Role of Morality. In 2019, he delivered the John Locke Lectures entitled "Minds that Speak". In 2007, Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit appeared from OUP, which explores Pettit's own thinking.

Currently, he is working on a new book project entitled The State, forthcoming from Princeton University Press next year.