Paul Russell (philosopher)

Paul Russell (born 1955) is a professor in philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he has been teaching since 1987.

He has been a research fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (1984–86); a visiting assistant professor at the University of Virginia (1988); a Mellon Fellow and a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University (1989–90); a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University (1991 and 1996); visiting associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh (1996–97), and a visiting professor (Kenan Distinguished Visitor) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2005). He is the Fowler Hamilton Visiting Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. In July 2015, Russell will begin research at the University of Gothenburg, where he will join their Moral Responsibility Research Initiative on a major grant from the Swedish Research Council.

His principal research interests include problems of free will and moral responsibility and the history of early modern philosophy (particularly David Hume).

He is the author of Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility (1995) and The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (2008), both published by Oxford University Press. The latter book won the book prize from the Journal of the History of Philosophy in 2008, a prize bestowed on "the best published book in the history of philosophy." He serves on the editorial board of the journal Hume Studies.