Awards
- Titled Professor - 2011
- Ruth N. Halls Chair of Philosophy
- National Academies - 2002
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences
About Allen W. Wood
Allen Wood is Ruth Norman Halls Professor of Philosophy. He earned his BA from Reed College in 1964 and MA (1966) and PhD (1968) from Yale University.
His research interests are in the history of modern philosophy, especially Kant and German idealism, and in ethics and social philosophy. He studies philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who laid the foundations for the philosophy we study today and the ideas many people take for granted without knowing where they came from.
Professor Wood was born in Seattle, Washington and has held regular professorships at Cornell University, Yale University, and am Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor emeritus at Stanford University. He has also held visiting appointments at the University of Michigan, University of California at San Diego and Oxford University, where he was Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor in 2005. During year-long periods of research, he has been affiliated with the Freie Universität Berlin in 1983-84 and the Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn in 1991-1992.
At Indiana University he teaches courses in the history of modern philosophy, Kant and existentialism. He has written the following books: Kant's Moral Religion (1970, reissued 2009), Kant's Rational Theology (1978, reissued 2009), Karl Marx (1981, second expanded edition 2004), Hegel's Ethical Thought (1990), Kant's Ethical Thought (1999), Unsettling Obligations (2002), Kant (2004) and Kantian Ethics (2008). He is the general editor (with Paul Guyer) of the Cambridge Edition of Kant's Writings in English Translation, for which he has edited, translated or otherwise contributed to six volumes. Among the other books he has edited are Self and Nature in Kant's Philosophy (1984), Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991), Kant: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (2002), Fichte: Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (2010), and (with Songsuk Susan Hahn), the Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (2011). He is currently working on a book on Fichte's Ethical Thought.