Rex Martin Professor (Ph.D., Columbia)

Rex Martin received his B.A. degree, in History, from Rice University (in Houston, Texas) and his M.A. and Ph.D., in Philosophy, from Columbia University (in New York City). He also studied at New College, the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), for a year under a grant from the Society for Religion in Higher Education.
            He has held a Fulbright Research Fellowship at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has held visiting teaching appointments at Mount Vernon College (now part of George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.), the University of Auckland (New Zealand), the Faculty of Law, University of Sydney (Australia), and the University of Helsinki (Finland). And he has been a visiting research fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, in Italy (June 1980), at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (Spring 1984), at the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland (Spring 1991), at St. Catherine's College, Oxford (as Christensen Fellow, during Trinity Term 1999), at Helsinki University (under a grant from the Academy of Finland, April/May 2000), at the National Humanities Center (William C. and Ida Friday Senior Fellow, 2004-2005), and at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (April/May 2008).
            He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, where he has been since 1968. From January of 1995 through June 2000, he held, jointly with his position in the U.S., appointment as Professor of Political Theory and Government in the University of Wales Swansea, and was a Professorial Fellow at the Collingwood Centre there. He continues his academic connections with Britain as an Honorary Professor in the School of European Studies at Cardiff University and, in June 2005, was a Distinguished Visiting Professorial Fellow at Cardiff.
            He has been active in the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR) and was a member of the IVR Executive Committee, 1991-2003, and Vice President, 1995-2003. He was President of the American Section of IVR in 1993-1995. He also served as Chair of the American Philosophical Association's Committee on Philosophy and Law during that same period, 1992-1995.
            His fields of major interest are political and legal philosophy (in particular rights, and economic justice), history of political thought, and philosophy of history. He is the author of articles in these fields as well as of three books: Historical Explanation: Re-enactment and Practical Inference (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977; in Chinese translation, 2005), Rawls and Rights (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1985; in paper 1986), and A System of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, in paper 1997; in Spanish translation, 2001). He and Mark Singer are the editors of G. C. MacCallum, Legislative Intent, and Other Essays on Law, Politics and Morality (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). Martin edited the revised edition of R. G. Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics for the Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press (1998, 2002 in paper). And, most recently, he and David Reidy are the editors of Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia? Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. This book was one of Choice magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2006.

Fall 2008 Courses:
Philosophy 668: Political Philosophy (Team taught with Paul Schumaker, Political Science)
Philosophy 884: Topics in Social and Political Philosophy: Rights, Freedom and Equality (Team taught with Derrick Darby)

E-mail: Professor Rex Martin has changed his e-mail address to the following, please make a note: rexm@ku.edu