Prof. Dr. Jens Timmermann has been teaching at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland since 2000 and has held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at the University since 2015. Before that, he was a Research Fellow at Keble College, Oxford, and at the University of Pavia (Italy). He holds doctoral degrees from Göttingen and St. Andrews.

He trained as an ancient philosopher but now specialises in moral, legal and political philosophy, primarily from a Kantian perspective. His publications include the monographs Sittengesetz und Freiheit (De Gruyter, 2003), Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Kant’s Will at the Crossroads (Oxford University Press, 2022), Kant and the Supposed Right to Lie (Cambridge University Press, 2025) und Kant and the Supposed Right of Necessity (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2026). Much of his recent work has focused on Kant’s philosophy of law. At Münster, he will be working on the ontology of artworks and on the question of how digitisation is changing our access to the philosophical tradition. 

Jens Timmermann held major visiting appointments at the universities of Göttingen, Zurich, Cambridge, Münster, Vienna and Luxembourg, at Keio University in Tokyo, at Brandeis University and at the Netherlands and Greifswald Institutes for Advanced Study. In 2010, he received the Junior International Kant Prize. He was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2023.