Rae Langton (born February 14, 1961) is Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College. Before moving to Cambridge in 2013, she held professorships at Edinburgh and MIT. Langton delivered the John Locke Lectures in 2015, the H.L.A. Hart Memorial Lecture in 2019, and a number of other prestigious philosophy lectures. She figures in the Prospect Magazine’s “Top 50 World Thinkers” of 2014, voted 18th (and 4th woman) among those who most originally and profoundly engaged with the central questions of today’s world.
Langton is best known for her work on pornography and hate speech, especially for her analysis of both in terms of subordinating and silencing speech. In her now classic “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” Langton (1993a) defends the philosophical plausibility of Catharine MacKinnon’s (1987) claim that pornography subordinates and silences women. Langton’s argument is.
