Paul Guyer was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island, where he graduated from Lynbrook Public High School in 1965. He then attended Harvard University, where he received his A.B. summa cum laude in Philosophy in 1969, his A.M. in Philosophy in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1974. He was an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh from 1973 to 1978, with time out for a semester as Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan in 1975. He was an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois-Chicago from 1978 to 1983. He was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, after an initial appointment as Visiting Associate Professor in 1982. He was named the first Florence R.C. Murray Professor in the Humanities in 1991. He served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy in 1984-89, 1995-96, and 1998-2001. He has also been a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University (1987) and Harvard University (2002). He has twice held research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1978-79 and 1989-90) and was a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1983. In 1996, he was awarded the Centennial Medal of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for his contributions to scholarship.

Professor Guyer has been interested in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant since the beginning of his philosophical studies, and has worked on many aspects of Kant's philosophy, as well as on the history of modern philosophy more generally, the history of aesthetics, and in contemporary aesthetics. He is the author of over one hundred articles and forty book reviews in all of these areas. His first book was Kant and the Claims of Taste, originally published in 1979 and awarded the Matchette Prize of the American Philosophical Association in 1981. This book has remained the standard commentary on Kant's theory of taste since it was published, and was republished with a new foreward and additional chapter in 1997. Guyer's further books have included: Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (1987), a work on the central arguments of the Critique of Pure Reason; Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (1993), which explores systematic connections between Kant's aesthetics and his ethics as well as historical connections between Kant's aesthetics and other authors in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from Shaftesbury through Hegel; and Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (2000), which includes essays on the development of Kant's ethics, its central principles, his political philosophy, and Kant's application of his practical philosophy in philosophy of history and eschatology.

Since 1986, Professor Guyer has been General Co-Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, of which eleven of fifteen planned volumes have now been published. For this edition, he has coedited and cotranslated Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, with Allen Wood (1998), and edited and cotranslated Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, with Eric Matthews (2000). He is currently completing work on a volume of Kant's Notes and Fragments for this edition.

Professor Guyer has also edited four anthologies, including Essays in Kant's Aesthetics, with Ted Cohen (1982); the Cambridge Companion to Kant (1992); Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, with Ted Cohen and Hilary Putnam (1993); and Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays (1998). He is currently preparing a new edition of the Cambridge Companion to Kant and editing Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays.

Professor Guyer's other current projects and projects planned for the near future include an introductory survey of Kant's philosophy, a work on Kant's system of nature and freedom, and a history of modern aesthetics.

Curriculum Vitae

(updated July 2006)