Dorothy Mary Emmet (; 29 September 1904,

Kensington Kensington is a district in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in the West of Central London. The district's commercial heart is Kensington High Street, running on an east–west axis. The north-east is taken up by Kensington Garden ...

, London – 20 September 2000,

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

) was a British

philosopher A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...

and head of Manchester University's philosophy department for over twenty years. With

Margaret Masterman Margaret Masterman (4 May 1910 – 1 April 1986) was a British linguist and philosopher, most known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation. She founded the Cambridge Language Re ...

and

Richard Braithwaite Richard Bevan Braithwaite (15 January 1900 – 21 April 1990) was an English philosopher who specialized in the philosophy of science, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Life Braithwaite was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, son of the ...

she was a founder member of the Epiphany Philosophers. She was the doctoral advisor of

Alasdair MacIntyre Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (; born 12 January 1929) is a Scottish-American philosopher who has contributed to moral and political philosophy as well as history of philosophy and theology. MacIntyre's '' After Virtue'' (1981) is one of the mos ...

and Robert Austin Markus. Emmet was educated at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, where she took first-class honours in 1927.

Positions held

*Commonwealth Fellowship at

Radcliffe College Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. Considered founded in 1879, it was one of the Seven Sisters colleges and h ...

*Tutor at

Somerville College, Oxford Somerville College, a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England, was founded in 1879 as Somerville Hall, one of its first two women's colleges. Among its alumnae have been Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Dorothy Hodgkin, I ...

*Lecturer in philosophy at Armstrong College,

Newcastle-upon-Tyne Newcastle upon Tyne ( RP: , ), or simply Newcastle, is a city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England. The city is located on the River Tyne's northern bank and forms the largest part of the Tyneside built-up area. Newcastle is ...

(now

Newcastle University Newcastle University (legally the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) is a UK public research university based in Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England. It has overseas campuses in Singapore and Malaysia. The university is a red brick unive ...

) 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 The Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy, more generally known as the Aristotelian Society, is a philosophical society in London. History Aristotelian Society was founded at a meeting on 19 April 1880, at 17 Bloomsbury Squa ...

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 The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars s ...

(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

). *'' 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)

References

Sources

Obituary: Dorothy Emmet
''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers '' The Observer'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the ...

,'' 27 September 2000
Dorothy Emmet
''Times'' obituary, 8 October 2000 – archived by

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

* James A. Bradley, André Cloots, Helmut Maaßen and

Michel Weber Michel Weber (born 1963) is a Belgian philosopher. He is best known as an interpreter and advocate of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and has come to prominence as the architect and organizer of an overlapping array of international ...

(eds.),
European Studies in Process Thought, Vol. I. In Memoriam Dorothy Emmet
', Leuven, European Society for Process Thought, 2003 (). * Leemon McHenry,
Dorothy M. Emmet (1904–2000)
" in

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. 1904 births 2000 deaths Philosophers of religion Metaphysicians British women philosophers Presidents of the Aristotelian Society 20th-century British philosophers Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford {{reli-philo-bio-stub