Mark Johnston (philosopher)


Mark Johnston is an Australian philosopher and the Henry Putnam University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, where he is also the Director of the Program in Cognitive Science.

Biography and career

A native of Australia, Johnston was "educated by Jesuits and briefly considered taking priestly orders before opting for a PhD in philosophy instead." Johnston received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1984 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Particulars and persistence", under the supervision of Saul Kripke and David Lewis.
Johnston is also the Senior Academic Advisor to the Marc Sanders Foundation, which awards prizes for the best work in various areas of philosophy, such as metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and ethics.

Philosophical work

Johnston has written many articles on topics in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophical logic, and metaethics and, more recently, two books in philosophy of religion, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry and Surviving Death. The literary critic James Wood picked Saving God as one of the top non-fiction books of 2009 in The New Yorker.

Selected articles