12/11/2018 – Rae Langton on Empathy and First Personal Imagining

Rae Langton is Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Newnham College. Born and raised in India, she studied Philosophy at Sydney and Princeton, and has taught philosophy in Australia, Scotland, the USA, and England. She held professorships at Edinburgh 1999-2004 and at MIT 2004-2013. She works in moral and political philosophy, speech act theory, philosophy of law, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her best known articles are ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’, ‘Duty and Desolation’, and ‘Defining Intrinsic’ (co-authored with David Lewis). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013, to the British Academy in 2014, and to the Academia Europeae in 2017. She is one of five Cambridge faculty 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’. In 2015 she gave the John Locke Lectures, currently being finalised for publication. She plans to give the H.L.A.Hart Lecture in 2019.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Langton's talk - 'Empathy and First Personal Imagining' - at the Aristotelian Society on 12 November 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.