Stephen Priest

Stephen Priest, Oxford

Stephen Priest (born 1954) is a British philosopher. He is a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Blackfriars, Oxford and a member of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Oxford. He is also a member of Wolfson College, Oxford and Hughes Hall, Cambridge. He has held Visiting Professorships in the USA, Europe and Asia, and is best known for bringing the methods of analytic philosophy to Continental thinkers including Hegel, Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

Publications

Stephen Priest is author or editor of nineteen books focusing mainly on Kant and the post-Kantian Continental tradition, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. He is also author of many articles on these and other themes. Priest's publications include:

Books As Author

Stephen Priest, The Subject in Question

*The British Empiricists (London: Penguin Books, 1990), (Second Edition: London & New York: Routledge, 2007)

• Theories of the Mind (London: Penguin Books & Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1991)
• Merleau-Ponty ‘The Arguments of the Philosophers’ (Routledge, 1998, 2003)
• The Subject in Question (Routledge, 2000)

Books As Editor

• Hegel’s Critique of Kant (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
• Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings (ed.) (London: Routledge, 2001)
• A Dictionary of Philosophy (ed.) with Antony Flew (London: Macmillan, 2002)

Philosophical Questions: Theological Answers

In the 2000s Priest's thought has focused on the relationship between philosophy and theology. In April 2008 a symposium took place at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Oxford on an unpublished manuscript by Priest entitled 'Philosophical Questions: Theological Answers'. As of January 2020 'Philosophical Questions: Theological Answers' has not been published. However, Priest has delivered talks on the relationship between philosophy and theology at numerous events, some of which can be watched online. In October 2011, Priest was one of three speakers ask to stand in for Richard Dawkins at an event at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford where Dawkins refused to debate philosopher and theologian, William Lane Craig. Priest's contribution was described by journalist Peter Hitchens as "The most moving – and most enjoyable – contribution of the evening... simultaneously diffident and extremely powerful." A video of this event can be viewed at Craig's website, Reasonable Faith.