C. A. J. Coady

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Cecil Anthony John Coady, known in publishing as C. A. J. Coady and more informally as Tony Coady, is an Australian philosopher born on 18 April 1936. He works mainly in epistemology but also in political and applied philosophy. His best-known work explores the epistemological problems of testimony, especially in his book Testimony: a Philosophical Study (Oxford University Press, 1990), which helped create a new line of inquiry in epistemology. He is also noted for writing on political violence and for commenting on public affairs in Australia.

Education and early career: Coady studied philosophy at the University of Sydney as a part-time student while working as a journalist, earning a BA in 1962. He then completed an MA with First Class Honours in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne in 1963. That year he won the Daniel Mannix Scholarship to study at Oxford, where he earned the B.Phil. in philosophy in 1965 (second in his year). He later earned an MA at the University of Cambridge in 1973.

Academic career: Coady’s first full-time academic post was as a philosophy lecturer at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1965–66). In 1966 he returned to Melbourne to take a lectureship at the University of Melbourne. He became a reader in philosophy there in 1977 and was Boyce Gibson Professor from 1990 to 1998. He later served as an Australian Research Council Senior Research Fellow and professorial fellow. He is now professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Melbourne and an honorary fellow in the Institute of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University.

Centres and visiting roles: In 1990 he founded the Philosophy Centre for Philosophy and Public Issues (CPPI) at the University of Melbourne, the first Australian centre focused on broad philosophy and public affairs. CPPI later became part of CAPPE (ARC Special Research Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics) established in 2000, where Coady served as deputy director and led the Melbourne division. He has held visiting positions at Oxford and Cambridge, the University Center for Human Values at Princeton, the Institute for Peace in Washington, D.C., and the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio, Italy.