Alice Marguerite Crary was born in 1967 in Seattle, Washington. During high school, she was a national champion rower at theLakeside School (Seattle) inSeattle, Washington, and competed internationally and placed 6th in the Junior Women's Eight at the 1985 World Rowing Junior Championships inBrandenburg, Germany.[3]
Crary is university distinguished professor at the Graduate Faculty ofThe New School for Social Research in New York City.[7] She has held visiting fellowships at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford (2018–19),[8][5] All Souls College, Oxford (2021–22), and the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Sciences (2017–18).[9]
Crary frequently participates in and organizes events for public discussion,[10][11][12] such as public debates on the valuation of life[13] and the treatment of animals and the cognitively disabled.[14][15][16] She has also written for theNew York Times.[17][18]
Crary's first monograph,Beyond Moral Judgment,[19] discusses how literature and feminism help to reframe moral presuppositions. HerInside Ethics[20] argues that ethics in disability studies and animal studies is stunted by a lack of moral imagination, caused by a narrow understanding of rationality and by a philosophy severed from literature and art.[21][22]
Crary's work on feminism is critical of standard views ofobjectivity inanalytic philosophy andpost-structuralism. Drawing on Wittgenstein and feminist theory, Crary rejects the view that objectivity is value-neutral, and thus incompatible with ethical and political perspectives.[23] According to Crary, these "ethically-loaded perspectives" invite both cognitive and ethical appreciation for the lives of women, in ways that count as objective knowledge.[24] Like her moral philosophy, her feminist conception of objectivity is informed by Wittgenstein, who she understands as proposing a "wide" view of objectivity: one in which affective responses are not merely non-cognitive persuasive manipulations but reveal real forms of suffering that give us a more objective understanding of the world.[25]
Crary is associated with the so-called "therapeutic"[26] or "resolute"[27] reading of Wittgenstein. In her co-edited collection of essays of such readings,The New Wittgenstein, her own contribution argues against the standard use-theory readings of Wittgenstein that often render his thought as politically conservative and implausible.[28] Since then, she has contributed to numerous collections of Wittgenstein scholarship, includingEmotions and Understanding[29] and interpretations of Wittgenstein'sOn Certainty.[30]
Crary has promoted (e.g., in her 2024 Cambridge Union opposition[31]) the view that humans and animals have moral worth above and beyond any quantitative valuation.[32]
John Harvard Scholarships, Fall 1987, Spring 1989, 1989–1990
Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard College, 1990
Bechtel Prize, Harvard University prize for the best undergraduate or graduate essay in philosophy (awarded for her honors thesis, “I Know I’m in Pain”), 1990
Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, University of Pittsburgh, 1991–1992
University of Pittsburgh Teaching Fellowship, Fall 1992
Alan Ross Anderson Fellowship (study of logic), University of Pittsburgh, Spring 1993
Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching (Bok Center), 1993–1994
University of Pittsburgh Teaching Fellowships, 1994–1997
Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (study of ethical and religious values), University of Pittsburgh, 1997–1998
Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, 2003–2004
Faculty Fellow, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, 2004–2005
University Distinguished Teaching Award, The New School, New York (awarded annually to one member of the Graduate Faculty), 2005
Convocation Speaker, The New School, New York, 2008
American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship, 2009–2010 (declined)
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, 2009–2010
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Grant for a Renewed Research Stay, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, 2014
Fellow, Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, 2016–present
Member, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Sciences, Princeton, NJ, 2017–2018[9]
Honorary Guest Wittgenstein Professor, University of Innsbruck, Austria, Summer 2018
Visiting fellow, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, 2020–present[5]
Visiting fellow, All Souls College, University of Oxford, 2021–2022
Adams, Carol J.; Crary, Alice; Gruen, Lori.The good it promises, the harm it does: critical essays on effective altruism. Oxford: Oxford University press.ISBN978-0-19-765570-2.
Cavell, Stanley; Bauer, Nancy; Crary, Alice; Laugier, Sandra (2022).Here and there: sites of philosophy. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University press.ISBN978-0-674-27048-0.
Diamond, Cora; Crary, Alice, eds. (2010).Wittgenstein and the moral life: essays in honor of Cora Diamond. Representation and mind. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.ISBN978-0-262-27096-0.
^Crary, Alice (August 24, 2015). "Feminist Thought and Rational Authority: Getting Things in Perspective".New Literary History.46 (2):287–308.doi:10.1353/nlh.2015.0010.S2CID143046249.
^See "What Do Feminists Want in an Epistemology?," in Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein, ed. Naomi Scheman and Peg O'Connor (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2002), pp. 112–113.
^Alice Crary, introduction to The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 1.
^Silver Bronzo, "The Resolute Reading and Its Critics: An Introduction to the Literature," Wittgenstein-Studien 3 (2012), p. 46.
