Skip to main content
Robin Attfield MA (Oxon), PhD (Wales), DLitt (Cardiff)

Professor Robin Attfield MA (Oxon), PhD (Wales), DLitt (Cardiff)

Emeritus Professor

School of English, Communication and Philosophy

Overview

Robin Attfield is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy (ENCAP) and also of the Sustainable Places Research Institute. He taught and researched areas of philosophy including ethics, philosophy of religion, history of philosophy and environmental philosophy from 1968 to 2009, and continues to work in these fields. He is the author or editor of 15 books and over 250 articles and chapters. His latest book is 'Environmental Ethics: A Very Short Introduction', published by Oxford University Press in 2018. His previous book was 'Wonder, Value and God', published initially by Ashgate in 2016, and now marketed by Routledge. He is currently seeing through the press a book to be called 'Environmental Thought: A Short History', due to be published by Polity Press (Cambridge), who are also the pulbishers of his textbook 'Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century' (second edition, 2014). He has received over 56,000 reads on ResesarchGate.

Research

Robin Attfield's research concerns ethics, philosophy of religion, history of ideas and environmental philosophy.

One recently published book is Creation, Evolution and Meaning, an interdisciplinary work bestriding the philosophies of religion, science and meaning and environmental ethics, published by Ashgate in 2006.
His previous book was Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century(Polity/Blackwell, 2003). His edited collection The Ethics of the Environment was published by Ashgate in 2008.

Research Interests

  • environmental philosophy (most branches)
  • ethics (including history of ethics)
  • history of ideas (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries)
  • philosophy of religion (religious language and theistic arguments)

Biography

Robin studied philosophy, classics and ancient history at Christ Church, Oxford and Theology at Regent's Park College, Oxford, undertook research at Manchester University, and has been lecturing in Philosophy at Cardiff since January 1968. He has also taught in Nigeria (1972-3) and in Kenya (1975). His Wales PhD was completed in 1972, and he has been a Professor of Philosophy from 1992.

His DLitt was awarded by Cardiff University in 2008.

He is a member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and was until recently a co-opted member of the Executive Committee of the British Philosophical Association. He is chair of the Cardiff Branch of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and has participated recently in a UNESCO international working party on Environmental Ethics.

External profiles