Paul Russell (philosopher)


Paul Russell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. From 2018-2025 he was also Professor of Philosophy at Lund University, where he was also Director of the Lund/Gothenburg Responsibility Project . Prior to that he was Professor of Philosophy at University of Gothenburg from 2015-2017.

Education and research

Paul Russell holds an undergraduate degree from Edinburgh University and a PhD from Cambridge University. 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 ; Stanford University, where he held a Mellon Fellowship; University of Pittsburgh ; and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was Kenan Distinguished Visitor. In 2010 he was the Fowler Hamilton Visiting Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford and in 2023 he was Beaufort Visiting Fellow at St. John's College, Cambridge.
His principal research interests include problems of free will and moral responsibility and the history of early modern philosophy.
He is the author of Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility, The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion, The Limits of Free Will: Selected Essays, Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy: Selected Essays, Moral Responsibility: A Very Short Introduction, 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." 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, The Scotsman, 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, including at the University of British Columbia, where he called for denunciations of disliked ideas to be measured and responsible.

Awards

Works

Books
  • Moral Responsibility: A Very Short Introduction.
  • Recasting Hume & Early Modern Philosophy: Selected Essays. New York.
  • The Limits of Free Will: Selected Essays.
  • The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion.
  • Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility. Published in paperback, 2002.
Books Introduced and Edited
  • Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: A Critical Guide..
  • The Oxford Handbook of Hume..
  • The Philosophy of Free Will: Essential Readings from the Contemporary Debates, edited with Oisin Deery.
  • Free Will and Reactive Attitudes: Perspectives on P.F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment”, Introduced and edited with Michael McKenna.
  • Joseph J. Russell, Analysis and Dialectic: Studies in the Logic of Foundation Problems, Introduced and edited by P. Russell.
Wrote Introductions For
  • David Hume, Dialoger om naturlig religion Swedish translation by Jan Landgren. The edition is provided with a newly written preface by Paul Russell.