Susanne Bobzien is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Oxford University (All Souls) and Visiting – Research – Fellow at Princeton’s Philosophy Department. From 2013-2023 she was Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, a position she resigned in autumn 2023 to take up a Visiting Professorship at Princeton in 2024, as she had to return to the US for family reasons. Previously, she was Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and before that she held a permanent position as a tutorial fellow and CUF lecturer (now called associate professor) at Oxford. She has a DPhil from the University of Oxford and a Magister Artium from the University of Bonn.
Bobzien works in both contemporary philosophy and the history of philosophy. Her main interests include logic and the history of logic (incl. Frege), ancient philosophy, vagueness and paradoxes, and determinism, freedom, & moral responsibility. She has also published on Kant's practical philosophy and has an interest in MAP.
She is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Corresponding Member of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science. She has been a Member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study (2008-9, 2022-23), and Visiting Professor at Princeton, UC Berkeley, and University of Bern, and University of Padua, and was Senior Visiting Fellow and Research Scholar at Yale University. She has been invited to deliver named lectures and lecture series at UCL, the University of London, the University of Padua, Athens, Oxford, UC Berkeley and Rutgers.
She was awarded a two-year British Academy Research Readership, a Fellowship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, research grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the IAS School of Historical Studies, and the Hetty Goldman Fund, among others.
Her best-known works include her influential book Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy; her paper "The inadvertent conception and late birth of the free-will problem"; her detailed reconstruction of Stoic syllogistic and sequent logic (1996, 2019); her introduction of the concepts of columnar higher-order vagueness and borderline nestings in her theory of vagueness (2013, 2015, 2024, 2025); her co-authored paper "Stoic logic and multiple generality"; and her widely discussed long essay "Frege plagiarized the Stoics" (2021).
