Dorothy Emmet

Dorothy Mary Emmet (/ˈɛmɪt/; 29 September 1904 – 20 September 2000) was a British philosopher and head of Manchester University's philosophy department for over twenty years.

With Margaret Masterman and Richard Braithwaite she was a founder member of the Epiphany Philosophers. Her graduate students at Manchester included Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Austin Markus. Emmet was educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she took first-class honours in 1927. She was elected to the membership of Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1945 while living in Northenden, Manchester.

Throughout her twenty-year tenure of the Sir Samuel Hall chair of philosophy at Manchester she was the University's sole woman professor. In her time there she was at the heart of a interdisciplinary conversation with a set of social scientists and philosophers, who included Michael Polanyi, Max Gluckman, W. J. M. Mackenzie and Ely Devons.

• Commonwealth Fellowship at Radcliffe College
• Tutor at Somerville College, Oxford
• Lecturer in philosophy at Armstrong College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (now Newcastle University) in 1932
• She joined Manchester University as a lecturer in the philosophy of religion in 1938. She was named reader in philosophy in 1945 and was appointed Sir Samuel Hall professor of philosophy in 1946.
• President of the Aristotelian Society in 1953–54.
• Fellow, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge in 1966

• Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism (1932)
• The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (1945)
• Annual philosophical lecture to the British Academy (1949)
• The Stanton lectures in Cambridge (1950–53)
• Function, Purpose and Powers (1958)
• Rules, Roles and Relations (1966)
• Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis (1970; co-edited with Alasdair MacIntyre).
• The Moral Prism (1979)
• The Effectiveness of Causes (1986)
• The Passage of Nature (1992)
• The Role of the Unrealisable (1994)
• Philosophers and Friends: Reminiscences of 70 Years in Philosophy (1996)