Peter J. King (born March 27, 1956) is a British poet and humanist philosopher. He teaches philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford and is the author of One Hundred Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers (2004).

Background

Peter John King was born in Boston, Lincolnshire. He attended St Mary's Catholic Primary School, then Boston Grammar School. [1] After leaving school, he decided against his long-standing desire to go into the theatre, becoming involved instead in the poetry scene in London, centred on the National Poetry Society in Earls Court Square, and running his own small poetry-publishing company, tapocketa press.

In 1980, he attended Middlesex Polytechnic, now Middlesex University, where he read for a Humanities degree, specialising in philosophy. Gaining first-class honours, he went on to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read for the B.Phil., a postgraduate philosophy degree, taking papers in philosophical logic, philosophy of science, and the seventeenth-century rationalists, and writing a thesis on "The Ontology of Possible Worlds". He extended this thesis for his D.Phil., which he took in 1995.

Academic career

King's teaching and publishing career began while he was still working on his doctorate. The former included Oxford College lectureships at St Edmund Hall, New College, and St Anne's College, as well as teaching at Birkbeck College and King's College London.

After taking his doctorate, he held Oxford college lectureships at St Hilda's College, Brasenose College, Somerville College, and Christ Church, before taking up his present position at Pembroke College. He has also held visiting lectureships at the University of North London and the University of Reading, and for a number of years lectured in Oxford on the philosophy of religion.

He has published both academic and more popular work, and is currently working on an introduction to the philosophy of religion, in the form of a series of dialogues. His interest in poetry continues, and he has collaborated with Andrea Christofidou on translations of modern Greek poets such as Karyotakis and Kavafis.

His research interests include moral philosophy, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophical logic, the philosophy of parapsychology, René Descartes, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill. In addition, his teaching interests include African philosophy, political philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science (including the philosophy of physics and of biology), the rationalists, and the empiricists.

He is a member of the Humanist Philosophers Group, [2] and maintains the philosophy portal, Philosophy around the Web. [3]

Main philosophy publications

• One Hundred Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers (2004. U.S.A.: Barrons ISBN 0764127918; U.K.: Apple ISBN 1840924624)
• "One man's meat is another man's person" (in "Mind: Its Place in the World — Non-Reductionist Approaches to the Ontology of Consciousness", edd Alexander Batthyany, Dimitri Constant, & Avshalom Elitzur; Ontos Verlag, forthcoming)
• "Parapsychology without the 'para' (or the psychology)" (Think 3; 2003)
• "Hereafter, in a later world than this" (Sorites 10; 1999)
• "The problem of evil" (Philosophical Writings 9; 1998)
• "Against tolerance" (Philosophy Now, 11; 1995)
• "Other times" (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73; 1995)
• "Lycan on Lewis and Meinong" (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XCIII, 2; 1993)

References

• "This & That" — King's website at Oxford
• King's webpage at Pembroke College