Allen W. Wood

Born in Seattle, WA, he has held professorships at Cornell University, Yale University, Stanford University, where he is now Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor emeritus, and at Indiana University since 2008. Additionally, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Michigan, University of California at San Diego and Oxford University, where he was Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor in 2005, and has been affiliated with the Freie Universität Berlin in 1983-84 and the Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn in 1991–1992.

In his keynote address to the Cape Town University Law School in 2007, Wood compared Kant's realm of ends to the African ideal of ubuntu, suggesting that although the two ideas were not the same "I do think they represent very much the same response to the human condition, as manifested in different cultural and historical conditions."

Along with Paul Guyer, Wood is general editor of the Cambridge Edition of Kant's Writings in English Translation, having contributed to six volumes. He has also edited Self and Nature in Kant's Philosophy (1984), Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991), Kant: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (2002), Fichte: Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (2010), and the Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790-1870), with Songsuk Susan Hahn (2012).

Wood has written prolifically on many subjects in moral and social philosophy, and publications he has authored include: Kant's Moral Religion (1970), Kant's Rational Theology (1978), Karl Marx (1981), Hegel's Ethical Thought (1990), Kant's Ethical Thought (1999), Unsettling Obligations (2002), Kant (2004), Kantian Ethics (2007) and The Free Development of Each: Studies in Freedom, Right and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy. He is also working on a book continuing his 'Ethical Thought' series entitled Fichte's Ethical Thought, fulfilling his earlier suggestion that "having written a book on Hegel's Ethical Thought and a book on Kant's Ethical Thought, I should... write a book... on Fichte's Ethical Thought.

Allen William Wood (born October 26, 1942) is an American philosopher specializing in the work of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism, with particular interests in ethics and social philosophy. One of the world’s foremost Kant scholars, he is the Ruth Norman Halls professor of philosophy at Indiana University, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and has held professorships and visiting appointments at numerous universities in the United States and Europe. In addition to popularising and clarifying the ethical thought of Kant, Wood has also mounted arguments against the validity of trolley problems in moral philosophy.