Shelly Kagan

Shelly Ian Kagan (born 1956) is an American philosopher and the Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, where he has taught since 1995. He is recognized for his contributions to animal ethics, moral philosophy, normative ethics, and the philosophy of death. In 2007, his Yale course on death was made available online for free, gaining significant popularity and leading to the publication of a book on the topic in 2012. Kagan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. He earned his BA from Wesleyan University in 1976 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1982, studying under Thomas Nagel. He previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Kagan's philosophical work includes his critiques of "ordinary morality" in "The Limits of Morality" (1989) and explorations of desert in "The Geometry of Desert" (2012). He also published "Normative Ethics" (1997) and "How to Count Animals, More or Less" (2019), which presents a hierarchical view of animal ethics.