Wikipedia Listing
Derk Pereboom is the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Ethics in the Department of Philosophy at Cornell. As Senior Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities, he oversees departments and programs in the arts and humanities, the J.S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, and the College Scholar Program.
Pereboom’s research focuses primarily on free will and the nature of mind. In his books Living without Free Will (Cambridge 2001) and Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (Oxford 2014), and Wrongdoing and the Moral Emotions, Pereboom defends and develops Spinoza’s view that we lack the sort of free will at issue in the traditional debate, but that this does not threaten the most important features of morality and meaning in life, and has the potential to enhance social harmony. In Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (Oxford 2011), he sets out and explores two options for naturalist accounts of consciousness, each inspired by ideas proposed by Kant. Pereboom is deeply committed to graduate and undergraduate education, and he is the recipient of several teaching awards.
Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Ethics
Henry W. Sage, President of Cornell’s Board of Trustees from 1875 to 1897, founded the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell in 1891 and named it for his wife, Susan Linn Sage, who had been tragically killed in 1885 in a carriage accident on Slaterville Road, southeast of Ithaca. The founding of the Sage School included his endowment of The Philosophical Review and the Susan Linn Sage Professorships, the first endowed named chairs at Cornell.