Rae Helen Langton, FBA (born 14 February 1961) is an Australian-British professor of philosophy.
[3] In 1986 Langton moved to the United States and began graduate work at Princeton University in the philosophy department.
[1] While studying social philosophy at Princeton she became interested in the philosophical debates on free speech and pornography.
[4] In 1998 Langton was a Fellow in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.
From 2004 to 2013 she was back in the United States as a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[1] In 2017 she was appointed to the Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, the first woman to hold this professorship.
"[17] Many of the papers she published from 1990–99 were collected in her 2009 book, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, along with her responses to some of her critics.
[18] Regarding this book, Wellesley College philosophy professor Mary Kate McGowan wrote in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews that "...Langton's crisp, clear, and careful argumentation proves that philosophy has much to offer the socially, politically and even legally charged issues addressed here...
"[14] Langton has written more than fifty articles about subjects ranging from feminist approaches to pornography, to animal ethics, to hate speech.