Peter J. King

Peter J. King (born 27 March 1956) is a British poet and humanist philosopher. He teaches philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford and is the author of One Hundred Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers (2004), which has been published in three English-language editions, and translated into a number of languages, including Chinese, French, Greek, Estonian, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, and Portuguese.

Background
Peter John King was born in Boston, Lincolnshire. He attended St Mary's Catholic Primary School, then Boston Grammar School. After leaving school, he decided against his long-standing desire to go into the theatre, becoming involved instead in the poetry scene in London, centred on the National Poetry Society in Earls Court Square, and running his own small press, tapocketa press.

In 1980, he attended Middlesex Polytechnic (now Middlesex University), where he read for a Humanities degree, specialising in philosophy. Gaining first-class honours, he went on to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read for the B.Phil., a postgraduate philosophy degree, taking papers in philosophical logic, philosophy of science, and the seventeenth-century rationalists, and writing a thesis on "The Ontology of Possible worlds". He extended this thesis for his D.Phil., which he took in 1995.

Academic career
King's teaching and publishing career began while he was still working on his doctorate. The former included Oxford College lectureships at St Edmund Hall, New College, and , as well as teaching at Birkbeck College and King's College London.

After taking his doctorate, he held Oxford college lectureships at , Brasenose College, Somerville College, and Christ Church before taking up his present position as a lecturer at Pembroke College. He is also a retained lecturer at St Edmund Hall, and has held visiting lectureships at the University of North London and the University of Reading, and for a number of years lectured in Oxford on the philosophy of religion.

He has published both academic and more popular work, and is currently working on an introduction to the philosophy of religion in the form of a series of dialogues. His interest in poetry continues, and he has collaborated with Andrea Christofidou on translations of modern Greek poets such as Kostas Karyotakis and Constantine P. Cavafy.

His research interests include moral philosophy, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophical logic, the philosophy of parapsychology, René Descartes, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill. In addition, his teaching interests include African philosophy, political philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science (including the philosophy of physics and of biology), the rationalists, and the empiricists.

He is a member of the Humanist Philosophers Group, and maintains the philosophy portal, Philosophy around the Web. [http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0337/phil_index.html]

Philosophical views
With regard to possible worlds, King started out as a modal realist, defending David Lewis's approach, but his work on the philosophy of time led him to reject this position, both because of the problem of differentiating worlds and because modal realism implies a McTaggartian unreality of time.

In ethics he takes a broadly objectivist view, coupled with utilitarianism: moral values, founded in human nature (especially rationality and sympathy), are objective, and the normative theory that makes best sense of those values is a utilitarian one.

King is a dualist concerning the nature of the mind, holding that the person is a combination of mind and body, these being distinct types of substance. In "One Man's Meat Is Another Man's Person" he has argued that, at least in theory, it is possible to test this view empirically.

Main philosophy publications
Books
*One Hundred Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers (2004. U.S.A.: Barrons ISBN 0-7641-2791-8; UK: Apple ISBN 1-84092-462-4)

Papers
*"No Plaything: Ethical Issues concerning Child-Pornography" (Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11, 3; 2008)
*"Philosophy in the Modern World" (UNESCO Courier, 9; 2007)
*"The Ontological Argument" (Richmond Journal of Philosophy 14, Spring 2007)
*"Petitionary Prayer" ([http://www.richmond-utcoll.ac.uk/rjp/Back%20Issues/Issue%2012.pdf Richmond Journal of Philosophy 12], Spring 2006)
*"One Man's Meat Is Another Man's Person" (in [http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v31&DBlocal&CMD=010a+2006483270&CNT=10+records+per+page Mind and Its Place in the World: Non-Reductionist Approaches to the Ontology of Consciousness], edd Alexander Batthyany & Avshalom Elitzur; Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2006. ISBN 3937202986)
*"Parapsychology without the 'Para' (or the Psychology)" (Think 3; 2003)
*"Hereafter, in a Later World Than This" (Sorites 10; 1999)
*"The Problem of Evil" (Philosophical Writings 9; 1998)
*"Against Tolerance" (Philosophy Now, 11; 1995)
*"Other Times" (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73; 1995)
*"Lycan on Lewis and Meinong" (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XCIII, 2; 1993)

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