Samuel Freeman (philosopher)

Samuel Freeman
Education	Harvard University University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Region	Western philosophy
Institutions	University of Pennsylvania
Thesis	Contractarianism and fundamental rights (1985)
Doctoral advisor	John Rawls
Main interests	Legal philosophy

Samuel Freeman is an American philosopher, Avalon Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a leading authority on the philosophy of John Rawls and also writes in political and legal philosophy, from a Rawlsian perspective.

Education and career

Freeman earned a J.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1977 and his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University in 1985 under the supervision of John Rawls. He joined the Penn faculty that year.

He has published many articles on issues in moral, political and legal philosophy from a Rawlsian perspective, some of which are collected in his 2006 book Justice and the Social Contract. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Books

Authored

• Justice and the Social Contract: Essays on Rawlsian Political Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2006)
• Rawls (Routledge, 2007)

Edited

• The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
• John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2007)