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 am honored to be serving as the president of the North American Kant Society.
Together with Lara Buchak, I direct the new Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion.
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 early modern 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 am also developing a scholarly-activist interest in food ethics.
Here is my CV.
Contact:
232 1879 Hall
Washington Road
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08540
chignell[at]princeton.edu
Virtual NAKS (VNAKS)
has started back up for the fall 2022 season. For more information, and to register, visit us here.
Food Ethics MOOC (coming soon)
The “Ethics of Eating” course that I taught at Cornell with Will Starr was a MOOC on EdX for many years. It is now in the process of being refreshed at Princeton and will soon be up (with lots of new content) on Coursera.
KantPapers.org
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 being refreshed and will soon be merged into the NAKS bibliography]
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.