Personal Info

E-mail: roger.crisp(at)st-annes.ox.ac.uk

Tel: 01865 274819

Web links: http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/members/roger_crisp

Academic Background:

I was in the first male cohort admitted to St Anne’s, in 1979. I studied for Literae Humaniores, the Classics Fellows at that time being Margaret Howatson, the late Margaret Hubbard and Gwynneth Matthews, and Barbara Mitchell. I took the B.Phil. in Philosophy in 1985, and the D.Phil. in 1988. My thesis was on utilitarianism. My first academic post was as a Junior Lecturer at Magdalen, in 1986. After two years at University College as a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow, working mainly on Aristotle and J.S. Mill, I was appointed to a Fellowship at St Anne’s in 1991. I was a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow in 2003-5, and in 2010-11 I was Findlay Visiting Professor in Philosophy at Boston University.

Teaching Interests:

Undergraduate: Ancient Philosophy (Plato and Aristotle); Ethics; Theory of Politics; Philosophy of Religion.
Graduate: Ethics (including metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics); Political Philosophy; Ancient Ethics.

Research Interests:

Most of my work has been and is in philosophical ethics. I have written on metaethics (on the nature of ethics, its epistemology, and its metaphysics), normative ethics (especially on utilitarianism and virtue ethics), and applied ethics (especially medical ethics, environmental ethics and business ethics; and I am Chairman of the Management Committee of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics: http://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk). I’m also interested in the history of ethics (especially ancient ethics and British moral philosophy since Hume), and am currently editing an Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics. I have defended a ‘sufficientarian’ view of justice (the idea that justice requires that we give priority to those who don’t have enough). I am writing a book about a work by Henry Sidgwick. His The Methods of Ethics (7th edn., 1907) is thought by a surprisingly large number of people (including me – sometimes, anyway) to be the best work in philosophical ethics ever written. You can read a bit more about my views in an interview in T. Petersen and J. Ryberg (ed.), Normative Ethics: Five Questions (Automatic Press, 2007). And there are some iTunes podcasts on the University site.

Selected Publications:

Roger Crisp, Routledge GuideBook to Mill on Utilitarianism, 1997

Roger Crisp, Translation of Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2000

Roger Crisp, Reasons and the Good, 2006 (http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199548699)