Mark Johnston (philosopher)

Mark Johnston is an Australian philosopher, who has spent his entire career at Princeton University.

Biography and career

Johnston is Walter Cerf *41 Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, where he has taught since earning his Ph.D there in 1984. His dissertation, "Particulars and Persistence,"^[1] was directed by Saul Kripke.^[2] A native of Australia, Johnston was "educated by Jesuits and briefly considered taking priestly orders before opting for a PhD in philosophy instead."^[3]

Johnston is also the Senior Academic Advisor to the Marc Sanders Foundation,^[4] which awards prizes for the best work in various areas of philosophy, such as metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and ethics.

Philosophical work

Johnston has written many articles on topics in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophical logic, and metaethics and, more recently, two books in philosophy of religion, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry (Princeton University Press, 2009)^[5] and Surviving Death (Princeton University Press, 2010).^[6] The literary critic James Wood picked Saving God as one of the top non-fiction books of 2009 in The New Yorker. ^[7]

Selected articles

• "Human Beings," Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987): 59-83.
• "Dispositional Theories of Value," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 63 (1989): 89-174 (with David K. Lewis and Michael A. Smith)
• "Reasons and Reductionism," Philosophical Review (1992): 589-618.
• "Constitution is Not Identity," Mind 101 (1992): 89-106.
• "Manifest Kinds," Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997): 564-583.
• "The Obscure Object of Hallucination," Philosophical Studies 120 (2004): 113-83.
• "Hylomorphism," Journal of Philosophy 103 (2006): 652-698.^[8]

References