Rae Helen Langton

Life, education and career

Langton was born in 1961 in Ludhiana, India to David Langton and his wife Valda. They were lay missionaries. She attended Hebron School, Coonoor and Ootacamund, India. In 1980 she moved to Australia and attended the University of New England. In 1981 she enrolled at the University of Sydney where she majored in philosophy. There she became interested in Kant. Her Honours thesis argued that Kant's scientific realism did not fit with his idealism. She graduated with First Class Honours in 1986. She was one of a group of women honours graduates at the time encouraged to continue their studies by applying to graduate school in the United States. In 1986 Langton moved to the United States and began graduate work at Princeton University in the philosophy department. While studying social philosophy at Princeton she became interested in the philosophical debates on free speech and pornography.

In 1990, before writing her PhD thesis, Langton moved back to Australia. From 1990-98 she was a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy department of Monash University in Melbourne.

Langton received her PhD in 1995 from Princeton. Her thesis advisor was Margaret Dauler Wilson; and her thesis topic was Kantian Humility.

In 1998 Langton was a Fellow in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She moved to the United Kingdom in 1998. From 1998-99 she was a Lecturer at Sheffield University. From 1999 to 2004 she was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. From 2004-13 she was back in the United States as a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 2012 she was one of several philosophers who submitted evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics.

She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in October 2013.

In 2013 she joined the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and became a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2014, and gave the John Locke Lectures on 'Accommodating Injustice' at Oxford University in 2015.

In 2017 she was appointed to the Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, the first woman to hold this professorship.

She is married to fellow philosopher Richard Holton.

Philosophical work

In 1990, in response to Ronald Dworkin's Is There a Right to Pornography?, Langton published Whose right? Ronald Dworkin, Women, and Pornographers. In it she argued that the positions Dworkin takes on segregation and affirmative action are not consistent with his position in defence of pornography. The paper was voted one of the ten best articles in philosophy that year. In 1993 she published her paper Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts.

According to Mary Kate McGowan, "Rather than focus on the harms allegedly caused, Langton explores the hypothesis that pornography actually constitutes harm."

Her first book, Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves, is based on her thesis. According to one reviewer, "In this perspective there is no idealism in Kant, rather what Langton calls epistemic humility." Another reviewer described the book as "one of the most original and thought-provoking books on Kant to have appeared for quite some time."

Many of the papers she published from 1990-99 were collected in her 2009 book, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, along with her responses to some of her critics. Regarding this book, Wellesley College philosophy professor Mary Kate McGowan wrote in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews that "...Langton's crisp, clear, and careful argumentation proves that philosophy has much to offer the socially, politically and even legally charged issues addressed here... This is feminist scholarship at its very best. It's first-rate philosophy." Langton has written more than fifty articles about subjects ranging from feminist approaches to pornography, to animal ethics, to hate speech.

Awards and honours