Mark Gerald Kingwell FRSC (born March 1, 1963) is a Canadian philosopher, professor and former associate chair at the University of Toronto's Department of Philosophy.
Kingwell was born in Toronto but grew up on air force bases across Canada, including the Maritimes and Manitoba, where he graduated from St. Paul's High School in Winnipeg in 1980.
His doctoral supervisors were Georgia Warnke (Philosophy) and Bruce Ackerman (Law and Political Science); at Yale he also studied with Karsten Harries, G. R. F. Ferrari, Jonathan Lear, Maurice Natanson, and Ruth Barcan Marcus.
During this period (1985-1991) he worked as both a general assignment reporter and editorial writer at the Globe and Mail and a course instructor in Yale College.
Most notable are: A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism, which was awarded the Spitz Prize for political theory in 1997; Dreams of Millennium: Report from a Culture on the Brink, which was a Maclean's magazine Top Ten Book for 1996 and finalist for the Gordon Montador Prize for social commentary; In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living from Plato to Prozac, a cultural and philosophical critique of happiness that was a Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times, and Baltimore City Paper Top Ten book in 1998, also a finalist for the Gordon Montador Prize; and Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, which was a finalist for both the Writers Trust and British Columbia Non-Fiction Prizes in 2008.
His work on philosophy, art, and architecture has appeared in many leading academic journals and magazines, including The Journal of Philosophy, The Philosophical Forum, Ethics, Political Theory, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Wilson Quarterly, The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, Utne Reader, Adbusters, The Walrus, Harvard Design Magazine, LA+, Border Crossings, Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Art, Azure, Gray's Sporting Journal, Toronto Life, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and the National Post.
He was invited to give the 2024 Vincent Massey Memorial Lectures but withdrew after disagreements with CBC producers.
According to the Canadian Who's Who, he enjoys baseball, football, fly fishing, cricket, films, art collecting, and jazz, classical and pop music.