Robert Kane (Ph. D. Yale University) is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and Professor of Law at The University of Texas at Austin.
He is the author of seven books and more than eighty articles on the philosophy of mind, free will and action, ethics, value theory, political philosophy and philosophy of religion, including: Free Will and Values (1985), Through the Moral Maze (1994), The Significance of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1996), A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford, 2005), and Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2002, 2nd edition, 2011), and other collections, and a multiple contributor to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy.
His audio lecture series, The Quest for Meaning: Values, Ethics and the Modern Experience, appears in The Great Courses on Tape Series of The Teaching Company (Chantilly, Virginia). His book, The Significance of Free Will, was the first annual winner of the Robert W. Hamilton Faculty Book Award. His article on “The Modal Ontological Argument” (Mind, 1984), was selected by The Philosopher’s Annual as one of ten best of 1984.
The recipient of seventeen major teaching awards at the University of Texas, including the President’s Excellence Award for teaching in the University’s Honors Program, he was named in 1995 one of the initial members of the University’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He is known internationally for his defense of a traditional view of free will that is incompatible with determinism and for his attempt to reconcile such a view of with modern science, and to spell out its implications for ethics, values, moral responsibility, politics and law.