Dorothy Emmet

Dorothy Emmet
Born	Dorothy Mary Emmet (1904-09-29)29 September 1904 Kensington, London, England
Died	20 September 2000(2000-09-20) (aged 95) Cambridge, England
Education
Alma mater	Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford Radcliffe College
Doctoral advisor	Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophical work
School	Process philosophy
Institutions	Armstrong College, Newcastle University of Manchester Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge
Main interests	Metaphysics Philosophy of religion Ethics
Notable ideas	Social-role account of moral relations

Dorothy Mary Emmet (/ˈɛmɪt/; 29 September 1904 – 20 September 2000) was a British philosopher and head of Manchester University's philosophy department for over twenty years.

With Margaret Masterman and Richard Braithwaite she was a founder member of the Epiphany Philosophers. Her graduate students at Manchester included Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Austin Markus. Emmet was educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she took first-class honours in 1927. She was elected to the membership of Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1945 while living in Northenden, Manchester.

Throughout her twenty-year tenure of the Sir Samuel Hall chair of philosophy at Manchester she was the University's sole woman professor. In her time there she was at the heart of a interdisciplinary conversation with a set of social scientists and philosophers, who included Michael Polanyi, Max Gluckman, W. J. M. Mackenzie and Ely Devons.

Positions held

• Commonwealth Fellowship at Radcliffe College
• Tutor at Somerville College, Oxford
• Lecturer in philosophy at Armstrong College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (now Newcastle University) in 1932
• She joined Manchester University as a lecturer in the philosophy of religion in 1938. She was named reader in philosophy in 1945 and was appointed Sir Samuel Hall professor of philosophy in 1946.
• President of the Aristotelian Society in 1953–54.
• Fellow, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge in 1966

Publications

• Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism (1932)
• The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (1945)
• Annual philosophical lecture to the British Academy (1949)
• The Stanton lectures in Cambridge (1950–53)
• Function, Purpose and Powers (1958)
• Rules, Roles and Relations (1966)
• Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis (1970; co-edited with Alasdair MacIntyre).
• The Moral Prism (1979)
• The Effectiveness of Causes (1986)
• The Passage of Nature (1992)
• The Role of the Unrealisable (1994)
• Philosophers and Friends: Reminiscences of 70 Years in Philosophy (1996)

Sources

• Obituary: Dorothy Emmet The Guardian, 27 September 2000
• Dorothy Emmet Times obituary, 8 October 2000 – archived by Wayback Machine
• James A. Bradley, André Cloots, Helmut Maaßen and Michel Weber (eds.), European Studies in Process Thought, Vol. I. In Memoriam Dorothy Emmet, Leuven, European Society for Process Thought, 2003 (ISBN 3-8330-0512-2).
• Leemon McHenry, "Dorothy M. Emmet (1904–2000)," in Michel Weber and Will Desmond (eds.). Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought (Frankfurt / Lancaster, Ontos Verlag, 2008, pp. 649 sq.). Cf. Ronny Desmet & Michel Weber (edited by), Whitehead. The Algebra of Metaphysics. Applied Process Metaphysics Summer Institute Memorandum, Louvain-la-Neuve, Les Éditions Chromatika, 2010.
• Leemon McHenry, "EMMET, Dorothy Mary (1904–2000)" Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers, edited by Stuart Brown, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2005, pp. 266–268.

External links

• Works by or about Dorothy Emmet at the Internet Archive