Ralph C. S. Walker

Ralph Charles Sutherland Walker (born 2 June 1944) is a philosopher at Magdalen College, Oxford and an expert on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

Walker received his secondary education at Aberdeen Grammar School, Selwyn House School and Trinity College School.

He was then educated at McGill and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, before entering academia as a fellow at Merton College in 1968.

He moved to Magdalen in 1972, where he has worked since.

From 1984–85, he served as the Junior Proctor, with disciplinary oversight for the University.

Roger Scruton called Walker's book Kant "clear and scholarly" and the “‘positive’ rejoinder" to the “‘objective’ interpretation" of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, The Bounds of Sense, by P. F. Strawson, who had already been at Magdalen when Walker started his work there and remained a fellow until 1987.

From 1993–2003 he was a delegate to Oxford University Press and from 2000–2006 he was Head of the Humanities Division at Oxford, one of the most senior posts at the University.

Walker's later book, Kant and the Moral Law, was released in 1998 and has been translated into a number of languages.

His most recent work, Objective Imperatives: An Exploration of Kant's Moral Philosophy, was published in 2022.

Apart from focusing on Kant, Walker has also made contributions to the Coherence Theory of Truth.

Journal articles and papers by Ralph Walker can be found at JSTOR and philpapers.

See below for a selection of his papers:

In 2009, he retired from the position of Vice-President of Magdalen College.

Until his retirement from the position of Senior Tutor in Philosophy at Magdalen in 2012, he lectured in the Faculty of Philosophy, normally on Kant.

Upon his retirement, he was made an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College.