Alice Crary

After completing her PhD in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in December 1999, Alice Crary began an academic career marked by a sustained commitment to critical thought, gender studies, and ethics. She joined the New School for Social Research, where she rose through the academic ranks, becoming assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor. Between 2014 and 2017, she chaired the Philosophy Department and co-founded — after leading the steering committee responsible for its creation — the graduate program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, which has since become the New School’s Gender Institute.

Her international influence has led her to hold several prestigious positions abroad. She was a visiting professor at Humboldt University in Berlin in 2011, and Wittgenstein Honorary Professor at the University of Innsbruck in 2018. She has also taught multiple times at the Democracy and Diversity Summer Institute in Wrocław, Poland, notably in 2016, 2019, and 2023.

In the spring of 2019, she was welcomed as a visiting professor at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. That same year, she was appointed Walter A. Eberstadt University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, where she continues her work at the intersection of liberal studies and gender studies through 2025.

In parallel, she holds a position as Professor of Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, where she also serves as Director of Studies in Philosophy. Her career reflects a deeply rooted engagement with critical philosophical traditions and a keen attention to contemporary issues of social justice, gender, and pluralism.

A specialist in twentieth-century British and American moral philosophy, in the Anglo-American tradition of ordinary language philosophy (or linguistic philosophy), feminist philosophy, and animal ethics, Alice Crary has, over the past two decades, expanded her research to include social philosophy and social theory. She is particularly interested in structural explanations of social injustice, exploring how harm to humans and violence against animals are often driven by the same social mechanisms.

The project

Title: All Justice is Animal Justice

"This stay in Paris will provide Alice Crary the opportunity to complete a book currently in progress: All Justice is Animal Justice (hereafter AJAJ) is a philosophical work intended for a non-specialist audience, fully interdisciplinary in its approach. It draws on critical animal studies, critical climate studies, critical philosophy of race, feminist theory, and modern European history. The central thesis of AJAJ is that the animal cause is essential to the struggle for climate justice.

The book proceeds by deconstructing ideologies that obscure the connection between social justice and justice for animals. It shows how, in capitalist modernity, the debasement of animals coincides with — and serves as a conceptual tool for — the subjugation of many human beings. It follows that revaluing animal life, the core task of animal ethics, is also a fundamental condition for human justice.

AJAJ also examines the limitations of contemporary animal ethics, particularly its failure to fully meet this challenge. In doing so, the book sheds light on a still-available path toward a just and sustainable future for our multi-species world.

In addition to preparing this book, during her stay Alice Crary aims to further develop existing networks focused on Wittgenstein and feminism, the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, care ethics and environmental ethics, and realism — notably by mentoring early-career scholars and organizing workshops. She also intends to build a new network on ecofeminism and animal justice, for example by coordinating an edited volume."

Hosting institution: Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Institut des Sciences Juridique et Philosophique de la Sorbonne (ISJPS)

Selective Bibliography

• Animal Crisis, co-written with Lori Gruen, Polity, 2022 (translated into French, Vrin, 2024 as La Crise Animale)
• The Good it Promises, the Harm it Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism, co-edited with Carol Adams and Lori Gruen, Oxford University Press, 2023
• “The Toxic Ideology of Longtermism,” Radical Philosophy 
• “Metaphysics and Morals: How four women defended ethical thought against the legacy of positivism,” Boston Review, June 8, 2022.
• Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought, Harvard University Press, 2016