Sir Ralph Wedgwood, 4th Baronet

Professor Sir Ralph Nicholas Wedgwood, 4th Baronet (born 10 December 1964) is a British philosopher.^[1]

Wedgwood was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, the only son of Martin Wedgwood, later 3rd Baronet, and his wife the architectural historian Alexandra (known as Sandra; née Gordon Clark), daughter of the judge and crime novelist, Alfred Gordon Clark. He was named after his great-grandfather, Sir Ralph Wedgwood, 1st Baronet; his first name is pronounced /ˈreɪf/.^[2] Wedgwood is a great-great-great-great-great-grandson of the master potter Josiah Wedgwood. He inherited the Wedgwood Baronetcy of Etruria upon the death of his father on 12 October 2010. The heir presumptive to the Baronetcy is John Julian Wedgwood (born 1936), son of the 2nd Baronet.

Wedgwood was educated at Westminster School, Magdalen College, Oxford (BA); King's College London (MPhil) and Cornell University, New York, USA (PhD). He then was Assistant Professor of Philosophy, (1995–1999), and Associate Professor of Philosophy (1999-2002) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also in the USA. He was Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Oxford and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 2002, becoming full professor in 2007. At the beginning of 2012 he moved to become Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He held visiting research fellowships at Princeton University (2005), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2008), and the Australian National University (2010).

He states that his research interests are "ethics (including meta-ethics, practical reason, normative ethics, and the history of ethics) and epistemology".^[3] He is author of the book The Nature of Normativity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), and numerous papers on philosophy including the oft-cited paper The Fundamental Argument for Same-Sex Marriage^[4] which argues for the legitimacy of same-sex marriage (see also same-sex marriage in the United States). He has also written a piece on the same subject for the New York Times.^[5]

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References

1. ↑ ‘WEDGWOOD, Sir Ralph (Nicholas)’, Who's Who 2012, A & C Black, 2012; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2011 ; online edn, Nov 2011 accessed 11 Dec 2011
2. ↑ http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~wedgwood/framesetpronunciation.html
3. ↑ http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~wedgwood/index.html
4. ↑ Wedgwood, R. (1999), The Fundamental Argument for Same-Sex Marriage. Journal of Political Philosophy, 7: 225–242. doi:10.1111/1467-9760.00075 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9760.00075/abstract
5. ↑ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/marriage-meaning-and-equality/