Professor Philip Pettit has joined a long linage of esteemed academics including John Maynard Keynes and CS Lewis following his admission into the British Academy.

Professor Pettit was among 15 fellows from outside the UK to be invited into Britain’s most distinguished national body for the humanities and social sciences this week.

“I was very pleased and a little bit surprised,” Professor Pettit said.

“It’s really quite amazing. I’m the third person from the ANU School of Philosophy to be admitted into the Academy.

“It must be the only department in the world outside the UK to have that many.”

Professor Pettit’s career began in Ireland where he studied classics before discovering a passion for philosophy.

“Somebody told me about a subject where you could ask questions about free will, whether there was a god, and what is right and wrong,” he said.

“I thought – that’s what I want to do.”

An enduring fascination with some of life’s most puzzling questions took him from Dublin to Cambridge and then across the ocean to ANU in 1983.

He currently splits his time between Princeton University, where he has taught political theory and philosophy since 2002, and ANU.

In 2010 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent 2010-11 as a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural and Social Sciences at Stanford University.

He has published widely in the fields of moral and political theory, philosophy of the mind and metaphysics, and said the time he spends at ANU keeps him on his toes.

“The most exciting part of my career has been coming to ANU and becoming part of the Australian philosophy scene,” he said.

“There’s a wonderful trend of doing philosophy in a really upfront way; you admit to your ignorance and the things that puzzle you.

“I had begun to tire of philosophy and it really put the wind back in my sails.

“It’s like the Piccadilly Circus because every philosopher wants to get to ANU at some stage in their career. It’s absolutely outstanding by anyone’s standards.”