Jennifer Whiting

Jennifer Whiting (Ph.D. Cornell) taught at Pittsburgh from 1986 to 1997 and rejoined the department in 2015. During the early period, she and Stephen Engstrom co-taught a year-long seminar on the ethics of Aristotle and Kant and received an NEH grant for a conference whose talks were eventually published as Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty (Cambridge, 1996). Since her return in 2015, she has taught seminars on Plato and Aristotle, as well Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent and Reform by Tommie Shelby; Love and Justice; Personal Identity (with Erica Schumener); and Making Up Selves.

Her research is focused primarily on questions about the nature of persons and selves, questions at the intersection of metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of mind. Though her teaching interests range widely (including philosophy of literature and feminist philosophy), she has published primarily in ancient philosophy (especially Aristotle, but increasingly Plato) and contemporary moral psychology. Oxford University Press has published three volumes of her collected papers: [1] First, Second, and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity (2016); [2] Living Together: Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (2023); and [3] Body and Soul: Essays on Aristotle's Hylomorphism (2023).

Whiting has also taught at Harvard; Cornell; and the University of Toronto (where she was Chancellor Jackman Professor of Philosophy from 2003-2014). Whiting has received fellowships from the ACLS and NEH; the Howard Foundation; Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences and Cornell's Society for Humanities. She was also co-director with psychologist Louis Sass of an NEH Summer Institute on Mind, Self, and Psychopathology. In 2006, she received the Royal Society of Canada's Konrad Adenauer Research Award for lifetime achievement.

Selected publications

“See the Right Thing: “Paternal” Reason, Love, and Phronêsis” in Reason and Nature: Essays in Honor of John McDowell (edited by Boyle and Mylonaki; Harvard 2022)

“Non-substance Individuals In Aristotle’s Categories” (in Aristotelian Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of David Charles (edited by Bronstein, Johansen, and Peramatzis; Oxford 2024)

“False Pleasures in Plato’s Philebus” (in Strategies of Argument: Essays in Ancient Ethics, Epistemology, and Logic, edited by M. Lee, OUP 2014)

Reprinted in First, Second, and Other Selves (OUP 2016)

• “Friends and Future Selves” (Philosophical Review 1986)
• “Impersonal Friends” (Monist 1991)
• “Trusting ‘First’ and ‘Second’ Selves: Aristotelian Reflections on Virginia Woolf and Annette Baier” (in Persons and Passions: Essays in Honor of Annette Baier, Notre Dame 2005)
• “Love: Self-Propagation, Self-Preservation, or Ekstasis?” (Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2013)
• “Psychic Contingency in Plato” (The Divided Self in Plato, edited by Barney, Brennan, and Brittain, CUP 2012)

Reprinted in Living Together: Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (OUP 2023)

• “Eudaimonia, External Results, and Choosing Virtuous Actions ‘for themselves’ (PPR, 2002)
• “Self-Love and Authoritative Virtue: Prolegomenon to a Kantian Reading of EE viii 13” (in Engstrom and Whiting eds., Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty CUP 1996)
• “The Nicomachean Account of Philia” (in The Blackwell Guide to the Nicomachean Ethics, edited by R. Kraut)

Reprinted in Body and Soul: Essays on Aristotle’s Hylomorphism (OUP 2023)

• “Living Bodies” (in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, edited by Nussbaum and Rorty, OUP 1992)
• “Locomotive Soul: The Parts of Soul in Aristotle’s Scientific Works” (OSAP 2002)
• “Hylomorphic Virtue: Cosmology, Embryology, and Moral Development In Aristotle” (Philosophical Explorations 2019)
• “The Lockeanism of Aristotle” (Philosophia Antiquorum 2008)