Brian Leiter
Brian Leiter is the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director, Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at The University of Chicago Law School.
Brian Leiter was a Visiting Professor at the Law School in the fall of 2006 and joined the faculty July 1, 2008, simultaneously founding the Law School’s Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values. Prior to that, he taught for more than a dozen years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was the youngest chairholder in the history of the law school, and also served as professor of philosophy and founder and director of the University of Texas Law and Philosophy Program. He has also been a visiting professor of law at Yale University, of law and philosophy at University College London, and of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego.
Mr. Leiter's teaching and research interests are in general jurisprudence (including its intersection with issues in metaphysics and epistemology), moral and political philosophy (in both Anglophone and Continental traditions), and the law of evidence. His books include Objectivity in Law and Morals (Cambridge 2001) (editor), Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge 2002), The Future for Philosophy (Oxford 2004) (editor), Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy (Oxford 2007), and The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (2007) (co-editor). He is presently writing a book titled Why Tolerate Religion? He gave the 'Or 'Emet Lecture at York University, Toronto, in 2006; the Dunbar Lecture in Law and Philosophy at the University of Mississippi in 2008; and the Fresco Lectures in Jurisprudence at the University of Genoa, also in 2008. He was editor of the journal Legal Theory from 2000 to 2007 and is the founding editor of the Routledge Philosophers book series and of Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Law, which will appear annually starting in 2009.
Education:
AB, 1984, Princeton University; JD, 1987, PhD (philosophy), 1995, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
“Ahistorical commentators who too readily dismiss Nietzsche's interest in physiological questions (e.g., DeMan 1979: 119; Nehamas 1985: 120) miss the centrality of such ways of thinking to Nietzsche's naturalism and to the whole intellectual climate of the period. 'The naturalization of the image of man under the influence of natural science was the work of the materialist movement of the middle of the century' (Schnädelbach 1983: 229). In this regard, Nietzsche was very much a thinker of his times.”