Paul Russell (philosopher)

Paul Russell (born Glasgow, Scotland, 1955) is a professor in philosophy at Lund University, where he is Director of the Lund/Gothenburg Responsibility Project [LGRP]. Paul Russell is also a professor in philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he has been teaching since 1987. His position at Lund is a half-time research position and has been made possible thanks to a major grant from the Swedish Research Council for "the international recruitment of leading researchers" (2014).

Paul Russell holds an undergraduate degree from Edinburgh University (1979) and a PhD from Cambridge University (1986). At Cambridge his thesis work was supervised by Professor Sir Bernard Williams. He held a research fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge from 1984 to 1987.

Apart from the positions mentioned above he has also held a number of visiting appointments at various universities, including University of Virginia (1988); Stanford University (1989–1990), where he held a Mellon Fellowship; University of Pittsburgh (1996–1997); and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2005), where he was Kenan Distinguished Visitor. More recently, he held a half-time position as Professor at Gothenburg University (2015–2017). In 2010 he was the Fowler Hamilton Visiting Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford.[1]

His principal research interests include problems of free will and moral responsibility and the history of early modern philosophy (particularly David Hume).

He is the author of Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility (1995), The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (2008), and The Limits of Free Will: Selected Essays (2017), all published by Oxford University Press. His book The Riddle of Hume's Treatise won the book prize from the Journal of the History of Philosophy in 2008, a prize bestowed on "the best published book in the history of philosophy."[2][3] He has served on the editorial board of the journals Hume Studies and Journal of the History of Philosophy.

Along with his academic publications he has also published opinion pieces and reviews in a variety of venues including, The Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, the Times Literary Supplement, and Aeon. Selections of his work have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Polish, Italian and Hungarian.

In recent years Paul Russell has commented on and discussed issues relating to free speech on the university campus,[4][5] including at the University of British Columbia.[6][7][8]