Pauline Kleingeld - Biography#

Pauline Kleingeld studied in Leiden and Frankfurt/M; PhD Leiden, 1994. After teaching at Washington University in St. Louis for almost 11 years, she returned to the Netherlands for a fellowship at the NIAS. She accepted a position as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leiden, also serving a term as Dean and spending a five-month research visit at the Goethe University of Frankfurt/M. In 2011 she took up a professorship at the University of Groningen, where she has also served as Department Chair.

Research focus: history of philosophy (esp. the work of Immanuel Kant), ethics, and political philosophy. Her first monograph dealt with Kant’s philosophy of history. She then turned her interest to the late 18th-century German theories of ‘world citizenship’ (cosmopolitanism), to reconstruct largely forgotten philosophical debates and show their fruitfulness for current debates. After the publication of the resulting monograph, she turned to foundational issues in Kant’s and Kantian ethics, also taking up challenges to Kantianism arising from empirical psychology. Furthermore, she has written on family justice and on (dealing with) racism and sexism in the work of Kant, also contributing to public discussions of these issues in Dutch and German media.

In 2020 she was awarded the Spinoza Prize, the highest academic award in the Netherlands. She has been elected to membership in four national academies. She is the recipient of three NWO individual grants and a co-applicant of the €18.8M interdisciplinary 'Gravitation' consortium grant on Sustainable Cooperation (SCOOP, 2017 - 2026).

Her professional service record includes a term as President of the North American Kant Society, membership in the Kant-Kommission of the BBAW (overseeing work on the ‘Academy Edition’ of Kant’s works), and membership in the Executive Board of the Netherlands Research School of Practical Philosophy (OZSE). She served on the Governing Board of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association and on 14 editorial and advisory boards of journals and book series. She has been an active member of professional organisations, and she has organized (or co-organized) some 20 workshops and conferences.