Mark Johnston (philosopher)

[9] In January 2024, he will deliver the Romanell lecture at the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in New York City.

Though he first published in formal logic, working on a general solution to the reflexive paradoxes,[14] over his career Johnston has gone on to make influential contributions in a wide range of fields including ontology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, epistemology, religion, value theory and the ethics of investing.

[15] Johnston is known for (i) deflating the significance of the method of cases for philosophy, pointing to just how the empirical psychological theory of concepts undermines conceptual analysis as an interesting way for philosophy to proceed,[16][17] (ii) emphasizing the authority of affect,[18] (iii) explaining the straightforward coherence of wishful thinking and self-deception,[19] (iv) offering the idea of response-independence as a measure of the objectivity of a discourse,[20][21] (v) proposing an account of object perception as the presentation of external objects in a sensory-motor field, prior to the entertaining of truth evaluable perceptual contents,[22][23][24][25][26][27] (vi) introducing the original, pre-Lewisian distinction between perduring and enduring,[2] developing a distinctive partial endurance account of identity over time for those persisting material things that are not "ontological trash,"[28] (viii) examining the prospects of relativism about the self,[29][30] (ix) providing a straightforward account of constitution as the relation between a thing and its dependent parts,[31][32] (x) developing a general account of hylomorphism in terms of Nelson Goodman’s idea of relations that generate,[33] arguing that Nelson Goodman and Harry S. Leonard’s widely accepted mereology[34] does not provide the general theory of the part-whole relation, but only characterizes the simplest and most trivial wholes, the mereological sums,[35] (xi) developing both the so-called “personite” and other fellow-traveler worries problems[36][37] for reductive accounts of personal survival, and the remnant person problem for the view that we are essentially animals.

Its surprise consists in its topic, style, passion, range of religious and philosophical scholarship, and its daring blend of human depth and philosophical originality.”[40] Of Surviving Death, Jacques Berlinerblau, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education remarked “Johnston reveals himself to be an engaging wit, a swaggering polymath…and, above all, a major talent.”[41] Michael Forster observed "This outstanding book presents original and indeed brave views on a broad range of issues that are of compelling significance not only to philosophers but also to thinking people more generally.

"[30] In his 2023 Stanton Lectures,[9] Johnston offered a novel solution to the old problem of why an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God does not prevent horrendous evil.

In 1991, Johnston was—along with Amy Gutman, Jeffrey Stout, George Kateb and John Cooper— a founding member of the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Center for Human Values.

While chair of philosophy he helped Princeton hire into senior positions the distinguished American philosophers Delia Graff Fara, Anthony Appiah, Daniel Garber and three renowned Australia-based philosophers—Peter Singer, Michael Smith and Philip Pettit.

[43] Johnston has supervised many Ph.D. dissertations, including those of Jessica Boyd, Alex Byrne, Michael Graff Fara, Cody Gilmore, Sherif Girgis (pending), Caspar Hare, Benjamin Hellie, Jennifer Hawkins, Adam Lerner, Kirsten Larsen, Carla Marino-Rajme, Christopher O’Callaghan, Joshua O’ Rourke, Christian Perring, Christian Piller, James Pryor, Christopher Register, Scott Sehon, Kieran Setiya, David Sosa, Natalie Stoljar, Hwan Sunwoo, Nathaniel Tabris and Michael Thau.