Mara van der Lugt

I am a lecturer in philosophy at the University of St Andrews, working mainly on the history of philosophy (17th C – current day) but also on issues in contemporary philosophy, such as environmental ethics, animal ethics, and the philosophy of climate change. I’ve worked extensively on the philosophical tradition known as ‘pessimism’, and have introduced the concept of ‘hopeful pessimism’ in relation to climate crisis. I am currently working on a project on animals and nature in the history of philosophy.

I am the author of four books: Hopeful Pessimism (Princeton University Press, 2025); Begetting: What Does It Mean To Create A Child? (Princeton 2024), Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering (Princeton 2021), and Bayle, Jurieu, and the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (Oxford University Press, 2016). Begetting was a finalist for the 2025 PROSE Awards from the American Publishers' Association; Dark Matters was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021, and received an Honourable Mention from the Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize.

From 2025-2028 I will be working on a project on ‘Existential Gratitude and Spirituality’, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, together with Dr King-Ho Leung (King’s College London).