Philip Pettit: Five Themes from his Work

This volume documents the 16th Münster Lectures in Philosophy and examines five themes that are prominent in the work of philosopher and political theorist Philip Pettit. These themes are: Epistemology and Semantics, Philosophy of Mind, Consequentialism, Group Agency, and Republicanism.

The book provides insight into Pettit's work and demonstrates the central role his work plays in a number of contemporary philosophical debates. Pettit's contributions to the philosophy of mind and action, rational choice theory, the philosophy of the social sciences, as well as metaethics, normative ethics and political philosophy are main points of reference, and have advanced ongoing and initiated new discussions. The book shows that a striking feature of Pettit's work has been the depth of his analyses and arguments regarding individual topics - ranging from rule-following to free will, from group agency to social ontology and the methodology of the social sciences, from a defense of consequentialism to the revival of the republican tradition in the theory of democracy and to value theory, but also their systematic overall coherence.

The book contains Pettit's lecture 'Freedom and Other Robustly Demanding Goods', nine critical papers on Pettit's philosophy, and a reply article entitled 'Self-Defense on Five Fronts: A Reply to My Commentators'.

Philip Pettit is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University, where he has taught political theory and philosophy since 2002. From 2012-13 he will be spending Spring semester for each of a numbers of years in the Australian National University as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. Irish by background and training, 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; there he held a professorial position jointly in Social and Political Theory and Philosophy. He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2010 and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2013; he has long been a fellow of the Australian academies in Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds honorary professorships in Philosophy at Sydney University and Queen's University, Belfast and has been awarded honorary degrees by the National University of Ireland (Dublin), the University of Crete, Lund University, Université de Montreal and Queen's University, Belfast. Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit appeared from OUP in 2007, edited by Geoffrey Brennan, R.E.Goodin, Frank Jackson and Michael Smith.