Christine Korsgaard


Christine Marion Korsgaard, is an American philosopher and Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University whose main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal relationships; and in normativity in general.

Education and career

Korsgaard first attended Eastern Illinois University for two years and transferred to receive a B.A. from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D from Harvard, where she was a student of John Rawls. She received an LHD Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Illinois in 2004. She is a 1970 alumna of Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor, Ill.
She has taught at Yale, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago; since 1991 she has been a professor at Harvard University, where she is now Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy.
In 1996 Korsgaard published a book entitled The Sources of Normativity, which was the revised version of her Tanner Lectures on Human Values, and also a collection of her past papers on Kant's moral philosophy and Kantian approaches to contemporary moral philosophy: Creating the Kingdom of Ends. In 2002, she was the first woman to give the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford, which turned into her recent book, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity.
She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2001 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. She served as President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2008-2009, and held a Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award from 2006-2009.

Selected publications

Books