John Cottingham
Short curriculum vitae
Education
John Cottingham was born in London and educated at Merchant Taylors’ School Northwood and St John’s College, Oxford University, where he gained double first class honours in ‘Mods’ (Latin and Greek Languages and Literature) and ‘Greats’ (Philosophy and Ancient History). He later took his doctorate at Oxford University, writing a thesis on the philosophy of Descartes (supervisor: Anthony Kenny; examiners: Bernard Williams and L. J. Beck).
Appointments
In his early career, John Cottingham held positions at The University of Washington, Seattle, and at Exeter College, Oxford. Subsequently he has held visiting appointments in the United States (Fulbright Scholar) and New Zealand (Erskine Fellowship), and was for many years Head of Department and subsequently Director of Research at the Philosophy Department at the University of Reading, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He is currently Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Philosophy of Religion, Heythrop College, University of London. He is also an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford.
Awards and offices
Professor Cottingham has held the Radcliffe Research Fellowship in Philosophy, and has served as Chairman of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, as President of the Mind Association, and as President of the Aristotelian Society. He is (since 1993) Editor of Ratio, the international journal of analytic philosophy. In 2002-4 he was Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University. From 2005-8 he was Director of a three-year research project on Impartiality and Partiality in Ethics at Reading University, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. From 2007-9 he was President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion and and is a life member of the Council of the Society.
Some principal publications
John Cottingham is the author of numerous articles on early-modern philosophy, and on ethics and the philosophy of religion. His many books include Descartes (Blackwell, 1986), The Rationalists (Oxford University Press, 1988), Descartes’s Philosophy of Mind (Orion, 1997), Philosophy and the good life: reason and the passions in Greek, Cartesian and psychoanalytic ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1998), On the Meaning of Life (Routledge, 2003), The Spiritual Dimension (CUP, 2005), Cartesian Reflections (OUP, 2008) and Why Believe? (Continuum, 2009). He is co-translator of the standard three-volume Cambridge edition of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (CUP, 1985-91), and his edited collections include Reason, Will and Sensation (OUP, 1994), Western Philosophy: an anthology (Blackwell, 1996, 2nd edition 2008), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (CUP, 1992) and the Oxford Readings volume on Descartes (OUP, 1998). He is also general editor of the Oxford Philosophical Texts series.
The Moral Life, a multi-authored collection of papers honouring his work in moral psychology, ethics and the philosophy of religion, together with his replies, appeared in 2008.
John Cottingham, MA, DPhil. (Oxon.)
