Rae Langton

Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge

Prospect Magazine’s voted list of 50 ‘World Thinkers 2014’

Rae is the Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow at Newnham College. She was born and raised in India, her parents lay missionaries in Kashmir (her father a builder from Melbourne, her mother a nurse from Brisbane). She was educated in India (Hebron School, 1966-79), Australia (Sydney, BA Hons. 1986), and the USA (Princeton, PhD 1995). She taught at Monash University 1990-98, with a secondment to the Research School of Social Sciences, ANU, 1997-8. She was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh from 1999-2004, and Professor of Philosophy at MIT from 2004-2013.

Rae is the author of Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), and Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). In 2012 she testified to the Leveson Inquiry on the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press. She has received several honours for her work. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013, and to the British Academy in 2014. She was on Prospect Magazine’s voted list of 50 ‘World Thinkers 2014’, chosen for ‘engaging most originally and profoundly with the central questions of the world today’. She works in many areas of philosophy, and is currently looking at questions about hate speech, and the role of free speech in a democracy.