Dr. Peter A. French is the Lincoln Chair in Ethics, Professor of Philosophy, and the Director of the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University. He was the Cole Chair in Ethics, Director of the Ethics Center, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy of the University of South Florida. Before that he was the Lennox Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He has taught at Northern Arizona University; the University of Minnesota; Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and served as Exxon Distinguished Research Professor in the Center for the Study of Values at the University of Delaware. Dr. French has a BA from Gettysburg College, an MA from the University of Southern California, a Ph.D. from the University of Miami, and did post-doctoral work at Oxford University. He was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters degree by Gettysburg College in 2006. He received the Horace T. Morse/Amoco Foundation Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education at the University of Minnesota in 1979, and the Governor of Minnesota's Certificate of Honor for Outstanding Contributions to Education in 1982. Dr. French has a national reputation in ethical and legal theory and in collective and corporate responsibility and criminal liability. He is the author of nineteen books including The Virtues of Vengeance; Cowboy Metaphysics: Ethics and Death in Westerns; Ethics and College Sports; Responsibility Matters; Corporate Ethics; Collective and Corporate Responsibility; War and Border Crossings; Corporations in the Moral Community; The Spectrum of Responsibility; Corrigible Corporations and Unruly Laws; Ethics in Government; and The Scope of Morality. His book on the My Lai Massacre, Individual and Collective Responsibility, is often cited as launching the field of applied ethics. Dr. French is a senior editor of Midwest Studies in Philosophy. He was the editor of the Journal of Social Philosophy and general editor of the Issues in Contemporary Ethics series. He has published scores of articles in the major philosophical and legal journals and reviews, many of which have been anthologized and translated into Chinese, Italian, German, French and other languages. Dr. French was honored in the 2008 edition of the American Philosophical Association's Newsletter on Philosophy and Law as its featured philosopher by a number of prominent philosophers writing about Dr. French's work. He is only the fourth philosopher so honored.
Courtesy of Arizona State University.