J. B. Schneewind

Jerome B. Schneewind (born 1930) is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University.

Life

He received his B.A. from Cornell and his Ph.D. from Princeton. Schneewind taught at Chicago, Princeton, Yale University, the University of Pittsburgh (where he was also for several years Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences) and Hunter College CUNY where he was also Provost before coming to Hopkins as chair of the philosophy department in 1981. He has also taught at Leicester, Stanford, and Helsinki. He taught courses on the history of ethics, types of ethical theory, the British empiricists, Kant's ethics, and utopian thought.

He has held Mellon, Guggenheim, and NEH fellowships and spent 1992-1993 as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. He is a past president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as Chair of the American Philosophical Association's Board of Officers from July 1999 to June 2002.

Works

Schneewind has edited several books, among them a two-volume collection of source material, "Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant", a translation of "Kant's Lectures on Ethics" for the Cambridge University Press edition of "Kant in English", and a collection of essays on philanthropy. His own writings include, in addition to many articles, two main books: "Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy" (1977), and "The Invention of Autonomy" (1998). His "Backgrounds of English Victorian Literature" is a very readable introduction to Victorian social and religious thought.