Photo: Albert Landau
ADRIAN PIPER
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (b. 1948) is a first-generation Conceptual
artist and analytic philosopher. She attended the New Lincoln School
throughout grammar school and high school, and the Art Students’ League
during high school. She began exhibiting her artwork internationally at the
age of twenty, and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969. While
continuing to produce and exhibit her artwork, she received a B.A. in
Philosophy with a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Musicology
from the City College of New York in 1974 and a Ph.D. in
Philosophy from Harvard University in 1981 under the supervision of John
Rawls; and studied Kant and Hegel with Dieter Henrich at the University of
Heidelberg in 1977-1978. Her formal education lasted a total of 27 years.
Adrian taught philosophy at Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford,
and UCSD. Following in the steps of trailblazing pioneer
Dr. Joyce Mitchell Cook,
in 1987 she became the first tenured African American woman professor
in the field of philosophy. For her refusal to return to the United States
while listed as a Suspicious Traveler on the U.S. Transportation Security
Administration’s Watch List, Wellesley College forcibly terminated her
tenured full professorship in philosophy in 2008. Her principal
philosophical publications are in metaethics, Kant, and the history of
ethics. Her two-volume study in Kantian metaethics,
Rationality and the
Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception and
Rationality and
the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception, was accepted
for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2008 and has been
available since then as an open access e-book at
http://adrianpiper.com/rss/index.shtml. This work critically surveys the
major moral theories of the late 20
th century, develops a Kantian
metaethical theory anchored in Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason, and
integrates standard decision theory into classical predicate logic.
Her third book,
Kant’s Metaethics: First Critique
Foundations, is nearing completion. [...]
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