Michael Smith took a BA and an MA in philosophy at Monash University and then went on to read for the BPhil and DPhil in philosophy at Oxford University. He held teaching appointments at Wadham College, Oxford (1984), at Monash (1984-5), at Princeton (1985-9), at Monash again (1989-94), and at the Research School of Social Sciences, ANU (1995-2004), before returning to Princeton in 2004. Smith was named McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton in 2009. He is also Associated Faculty Member of Princeton's Department of Politics and Honorary Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at Melbourne University. Smith's primary research interests include ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of mind and action, political philosophy and philosophy of law. He is the author of The Moral Problem (Blackwell, 1994), for which he was awarded the American Philosophical Association Book Prize 1994-6; Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Meta-Ethics (CUP, 2004); and co-author of Mind, Morality and Explanation: Selected Collaborations (OUP, 2004), a collection of papers written in various combinations by Smith, Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit. He is also the editor of Meta-Ethics (Dartmouth, 1995), and the co-editor of Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz (OUP, 2004) with Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, and Samuel Scheffler; The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy (OUP, 2005) with Frank Jackson; and Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit (OUP, 2007) with Geoffrey Brennan, Robert Goodin, and Frank Jackson. Smith has held visiting posts at universities in Australia (RSSS ANU, Melbourne), New Zealand (Canterbury, Otago, Victoria), USA (Ann Arbor, Arizona, Chapel Hill, Princeton), UK (Bristol), Sweden (Uppsala), Germany (Bayreuth, Humboldt), and Japan (joint between Kyoto, Osaka Dental, Kwansei Gakuin, Senshu, and Keio). In 2010 he was awarded a Humboldt Research Award ("Forschungspreis") by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

Last updated 23 November 2011