Professor Susan Wolf FBA

Summary

Susan Wolf is the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Emerita, where she taught from 2002 till 2022. Earlier, she taught at the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, and Harvard University. She received her B.A. in mathematics and philosophy from Yale University in 1974, and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1978.

Wolf is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society; she has held fellowships at Oxford and the Australian National University; she served as President of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division); she delivered the Spinoza Lectures at the University of Amsterdam in 2018 and the Locke Lectures at Oxford University in 2023. In 2004-07 she was honored with the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and in 2022 she received the Lauener Prize for an Outstanding Oeuvre in Analytical Philosophy.

Wolf works chiefly in ethics and its close relations in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, political philosophy, and aesthetics. Her interests range widely over moral psychology, value theory, and normative ethics. She has made contributions to our understanding of the nature and plurality of value, the importance of moral virtue, the possibility of freedom and responsibility in a deterministic world, and the pursuit of meaning in life. Her most notable works include “Moral Saints”, Freedom Within Reason (Oxford, 1990), Meaning in Life and Why it Matters (Princeton, 2010), and The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love (Oxford, 2015).