Welcome!

Since 2019 I have been a professor in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton, with appointments in the Religion and Philosophy departments.  From 2020 to 2023, I was the president of the North American Kant Society, and in 2024 I’m heading up (together with Katharina Kraus) the society’s North American efforts to celebrate Kant’s 300th birthday.

Together with Lara Buchak, I direct the new Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion (3PR). I’m also on the faculty steering committee for the Princeton DeCenter and co-directing the Princeton Food Project.  

From 2004 to 2016, I was assistant and then associate professor at Cornell’s Susan Linn Sage School of Philosophy, with affiliations in German Studies and Religious Studies

And from 2016 to 2017 I was a professor in the University of Pennsylvania Philosophy department.

My research focuses mostly on Immanuel Kant and other 17th-19th century philosophers, as well as on philosophy of religion, the ethics of belief, and certain issues in aesthetics and moral psychology (especially hope and despair). I also have a scholarly-activist interest in food and animal ethics

Here is my full CV


Contact:

232 1879 Hall
Washington Road
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544

chignell[at]princeton.edu

Kantpapers

A Kantian research resource constructed with the help of numerous research assistants over the years. Powered by the Kant section of PhilPapers.  [NOTE: this is currently being refreshed and will soon be merged into the NAKS bibliography]

Virtual Kant Congress

3PR postdoc Alexander Z Quanbeck and I, together with colleagues from Leuven have organized a virtual congress featuring 25 national Kant societies or groups, to celebrate his 300th birthday.  For more information, and to register, visit us here.

Food Ethics Online Course

This Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is free and open to anyone in the world.  It’s the online version of a course I started teaching with Will Starr at Cornell and later taught at Penn and Princeton.

Hope, Despair, Optimism, Pessimism

Website for a 4-year, $5M cross-disciplinary grant effort, co-directed with Sam Newlands at Notre Dame. The main goal was to bring philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, scholars of religion, and even some theater- and film-makers together to think collaboratively about the nature and roles of hope and despair in human life.