Peter Singer - Life and Career

Life and Career

Singer's parents were Viennese Jews who emigrated to Australia from Vienna in 1938, after Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany. They settled in Melbourne, where Singer was born. His grandparents were less fortunate: his paternal grandparents were taken by the Nazis to Łódź, and were never heard from again; his maternal grandfather died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He has a sister, Joan (now Joan Dwyer). Singer's father imported tea and coffee, while his mother practiced medicine. He attended Preshil and later Scotch College. After leaving school, Singer studied law, history and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, gaining his BA degree (hons) in 1967. He received an MA for a thesis entitled Why should I be moral? in 1969. He was awarded a scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, and obtained from there a B.Phil in 1971, with a thesis on civil disobedience supervised by R. M. Hare and subsequently published as a book in 1973. Singer names Hare and Australian philosopher H. D. McCloskey as his two most important mentors.

After spending two years as a Radcliffe lecturer at University College, Oxford, he was a visiting professor at New York University for 16 months. He returned to Melbourne in 1977, where he spent most of his career, aside from appointments as visiting faculty abroad, until his move to Princeton in 1999. In June 2011 it was announced he would join the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London, in addition to his work at Princeton.

According to philosopher Helga Kuhse, Singer is "almost certainly the best-known and most widely read of all contemporary philosophers". Michael Specter wrote that Singer is among the most influential of contemporary philosophers.