Rae Helen Langton

Rae Helen Langton (born 1961) is an Australian and British professor of philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and taught previously at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Edinburgh, and Monash University. She has published widely on Immanuel Kant's philosophy, moral philosophy, political philosophy, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. She is also well known for her work on pornography and objectification.

Early life and education

Langton was born in 1961 in Ludhiana, India. She attended Hebron School, Coonoor and Ootacamund, India. In 1980 she moved to Australia and attended the University of New England. In 1981 she enrolled at the University of Sydney where she majored in philosophy.^[1] There she became interested in Kant. Her Honours thesis argued that Kant's scientific realism did not fit with his idealism.^[2] She graduated with First Class Honours in 1986. She was one of a group of women honours graduates at the time encouraged to continue their studies by applying to graduate school in the United States.^[3] In 1986 Langton moved to the United States and began graduate work at Princeton University in the philosophy department.^[1] While studying social philosophy at Princeton she became interested in the philosophical debates on free speech and pornography.^[2]

In 1990, in response to Ronald Dworkin's Is There a Right to Pornography?,^[4] she published Whose right? Ronald Dworkin, Women, and Pornographers.^[5] In it she argued that the positions Dworkin takes on segregation and affirmative action are not consistent with his position in defence of pornography.^[6] The paper was voted one of the ten best articles in philosophy that year.^[7]

Langton received her PhD in 1995 from Princeton.^[1] Her thesis advisor was Margaret Dauler Wilson;^[2] and her thesis topic was Kantian Humility.^[8] She is married to fellow philosopher Richard Holton.^[1]

Philosophical work and career

In 1990, before writing her PhD thesis, Langton moved back to Australia. From 1990-98 she was a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy department of Monash University in Melbourne.^[2] In 1993 she published her paper Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts.^[9]

According to Mary Kate McGowan, "Rather than focus on the harms allegedly caused, Langton explores the hypothesis that pornography actually constitutes harm."^[10]

In 1998 Langton was a Fellow in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She published her first book, Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves,^[11] based on her thesis. According to one reviewer, "In this perspective there is no idealism in Kant, rather what Langton calls epistemic humility."^[12] Another reviewer described the book as "one of the most original and thought-provoking books on Kant to have appeared for quite some time."^[13]

Langton moved to the United Kingdom in 1998. From 1998-99 she was a Lecturer at Sheffield University. From 1999 to 2004 she was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. From 2004-13 she was back in the United States as a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[1]

Many of the papers she published from 1990-99 were collected in her 2009 book, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, along with her responses to some of her critics.^[14] Regarding this book, Wellesley College philosophy professor Mary Kate McGowan wrote in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews that "...Langton's crisp, clear, and careful argumentation proves that philosophy has much to offer the socially, politically and even legally charged issues addressed here... This is feminist scholarship at its very best. It's first-rate philosophy."^[10] Langton has written more than fifty articles about subjects ranging from feminist approaches to pornography, to animal ethics, to hate speech.^[1]

In 2012 she was one of several philosophers who submitted evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics.^[15]

She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in October 2013.^[16]

In 2013 she joined the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and became a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She gave the John Locke Lectures on 'Accommodating Injustice' at Oxford University in 2015.^[1]

Selected writings

• Langton, Rae (Autumn 1993). "Speech acts and unspeakable acts". Philosophy & Public Affairs. Wiley. 22 (4): 293–330. JSTOR 2265469.  Pdf.

See also: MacKinnon, Catharine A. (1987), "Francis Biddle's sister: pornography, civil rights, and speech", in MacKinnon, Catharine A., Feminism unmodified: discourses on life and law, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, pp. 177, 181 and 193, ISBN 9780674298743.  Preview.

See also: Davies, Alex (March 2014). "How to silence content with porn, context and loaded questions". European Journal of Philosophy. Wiley. doi:10.1111/ejop.12075. 

• Langton, Rae (January 1999). "Pornography: a liberal's unfinished business". The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence. Cambridge Journals. 12 (1): 109–133. doi:10.1017/S0841820900002162.  Pdf.
• Langton, Rae; West, Caroline (September 1999). "Scorekeeping in a pornographic language game". Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Taylor and Francis. 77 (3): 303–319. doi:10.1080/00048409912349061.  Pdf.

See also: McGill, Justine (2013), "The silencing of women", in Hutchison, Katrina; Jenkins, Fiona, Women in philosophy: what needs to change?, New York, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 197–214, ISBN 9780199325603.  Pdf.

Awards and honours

• Philosophers' Annual, Whose Right? ("top ten" articles of 1990)
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences, inducted October 2013
• Prospect Magazine—50 World's Top Thinker's 2014^[17]
• Elected a Fellow of the British Academy (2014).^[18]
• John Locke Lectures, Oxford University, in 2015
• Hägerström Lectures, Uppsala University, Sweden in 2015 ^[19]

References

External links

• Rae Langton CV