Susan James

Susan James (born 1951) is a British professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College London. She has previously taught at the University of Connecticut and the University of Cambridge. She is well known for her work on the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy.

Education and career

Susan James received her BA, MA and Ph.D. degrees in Philosophy from New Hall (now Murray Edwards College), University of Cambridge. She was Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut for two years before she returned to Cambridge, first as the Kathryn Jex Blake Research Fellow at Girton College and then as Lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy. She joined Birkbeck College in 2000 as Anniversary Reader, and became Professor of Philosophy in 2002. She was Chair of the Faculty of Philosophy in Cambridge from 1997–9 and then of the Birkbeck Philosophy Department in 2003–6. She is married and has two children.

She has held a number of Research Fellowships: from the British Academy and Leverhulme Foundation in 1994–5; at the Humanities Research Centre and Research School of Social Science, Australian National University (1994); at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1998); at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2003–04); at the Centre for Human Values, Princeton University (2013–14); and at the Berkeley UC School of Law (2019). She has also held a number of Visiting Professorships: she was the John Findlay Visiting Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Boston University in 2008; the Kohut Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago in 2017; and an Associate Member of the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, Johns Hopkins University (2015–18). She was President of the Aristotelian Society in 2015–16 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.

Philosophical work

Susan James has published seven books and more than 50 journal articles, ranging over the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, political and social philosophy, and feminist philosophy. Much of her research considers how early modern metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, political philosophy and ethics were thought to contribute to the overall project of living well. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1997) concentrates on the role of the passions in early modern conceptions of the good life. In her work on Margaret Cavendish, James explores Cavendish’s efforts to blend philosophical insight and fantasy into a productive form of self-understanding. Two books on Spinoza, Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics (2012) and Spinoza on learning to Live Together (2020) range over the religious, epistemological, political and ethical aspects of a philosophical way of life.

Throughout her work, Susan James tries to bring the history of philosophy into conversation with its contemporary counterpart. Her historical studies aim to illuminate contemporary philosophical problems.