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Richard Kraut

Charles and Emma Morrison Professor in the Humanities
Office: Kresge 3-205
E-mail: rkraut1@northwestern.edu
Phone: 847-491-2552

Charles and Emma Morrison Professor in the Humanities. Ph.D. Princeton University. His interests include contemporary moral and political philosophy, as well as the ethics and political thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He is the author of Against Absolute Goodness (Oxford: 2011) and What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being (Harvard, 2007). His historical studies include Socrates and the State (Princeton: 1984), Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: 1989), Aristotle Politics Books VII and VIII , translation with commentary (Clarendon: 1997), Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford: 2002), and How to Read Plato (Granta: 2008). He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Plato (1992), Plato's Republic: Critical Essays (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), and the Blackwell Guide to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (2006). He served as President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1993-4, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Center for Hellenic Studies. He served from 2002 to 2004 as the Vice-Chair of the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association. In 2006 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Starr Fellowship of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, for 2008-09.

CURRENT CV

 

Work

Books

• Socrates and the State (Princeton UP: 1984).
• Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton UP: 1989).
• Aristotle Politics Books VII and VIII, translation with commentary (Clarendon: 1997).
• Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford UP: 2002)
• What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being (Harvard UP: 2007).
• How to Read Plato (Granta Books: 2008).

Books Edited

• The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge, 1992).
• Plato's Republic: Critical Essays (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
• Aristotle's Politics: Critical Essays (with Steven Skultety, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005)
• The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (2006)

Selected articles and recent work

• "Two Conceptions of Happiness," The Philosophical Review 88 (1979), pp. 167-197. (Reprinted in Louis P. Pojman, ed., Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings , Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1989; also in William H. Shaw, ed., Social and Personal Ethics, Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1993, and in T.I. Irwin, ed., Articles on Greek and Roman Philosophy, Garland Publishing Inc.
• "The Defense of Justice in Plato's Republic ," in R. Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato , Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 311-337.
• "Desire and the Human Good," Presidential Address, Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 68:2 (Nov. 1994), pp. 39-54. Reprinted in Value, Morality, and the Good Life, Paul Moser/Thomas Carson (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996.
• "Return to the Cave: Republic 519-521," In Oxford Readings in Philosophy: Plato: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul, ed. by Gail Fine, Oxford University Press, 1999
• "Socrates," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th rev. ed., 2003.
• "Doing Without Morality: Reflections on the Meaning of Dein in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics", Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, May 2006, pp. 169-200.
• "How to Justify Ethical Propositions", in Richard Kraut (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, (2006, pp. 76-95).
• "The Examined Life", Sara Ahbel-Rappe & Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A Companion to Socrates. Blackwell (2006, pp. 228-42).

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