Dissertations that became books

I recently picked up Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's Moral Dilemmas (Blackwell, 1988), which developed from his doctoral dissertation. Having written a serviceable but undistinguished dissertation myself—one that would be wholly unsuitable for publication as a book—I'm always impressed by people whose dissertations are good enough to publish.

It occurred to me that it might be a useful exercise for graduate students, in thinking about their dissertation topic, to look at some books that were based on the author's dissertation. Even better would be to compare those books to the literature on that same topic from the five to ten years prior to the book's publication. The point is not necssarily to learn how to write a book-worthy dissertation, but to see how to write a dissertation that makes a really good contribution to the literature. (Since the book will probably differ from the dissertation, it might be worth getting the dissertation from ProQuest if you're really interested.)

One obvious problem in doing this is finding books that are based on dissertations. Sinnott-Armstrong's Moral Dilemmas is one. Peter van Inwagen's Essay on Free Will is another, though fourteen years elapsed between his finishing his PhD and the publication of the book. What other books were based on the author's dissertation?

Comments

[Gregg Caruso]

My *Free Will and Consciousness: A Determinist Account of the Illusion of Free Will* was based on my dissertation :O)

[Brad Cokelet]

David Brink's "Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics"

[Rachel]

Ask me in a couple months if I finally get a contract for my first book ;)

People should know that most big presses won't publish books (largely) based on dissertations. Some of them are *very* up front about this (MIT, CUP, for example).

[Joseph Edmund Dewhurst]

Kornblith's "Inductive Inference and Its Natural Ground" was based on his dissertation, I think (it's also very good).

[Olle Blomberg]

Liz Irvine's "Consciousness as a Scientific Concept" (Springer, 2013) was based on her 2011 PhD dissertation from the University of Edinburgh.

http://philosophyofbrains.com/2012/05/22/consciousness-science-a-science-of-what.aspx

[JM]

Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism.

[Ben Bryan]

Moral Principles and Political Obligation by A. John Simmons

Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition by Jean Hampton

Both are excellent and among the most influential books written on their topics (political obligation and Hobbes interpretation, respectively).

[Errol Lord]

Mark Schroeder's Slaves of the Passions
Lara Buchak's Risk and Rationality
Clayton Littlejohn's Justification and the Truth-Connection
Julia Markovits' Moral Reason
Kieran Setiya's Reasons Without Rationalism
Caspar Hare's Myself and Other Less Important Subjects
Gillian Russell's Truth in Virtue of Meaning
Casey O'Callaghan's Sounds: A Philosophical Theory
Ofra Magidor's Category Mistakes

[Eric Sampson]

Mike Titelbaum's Quitting Certainties: A Bayesian Framework Modeling Degrees of Belief

Mark Schroeder's Slaves of the Passions

[Michel X.]

Will Kymlicka - Liberalism, Community and Culture

[Brett]

David Chalmers' The Conscious Mind is largely based on the PhD dissertation he wrote at Indiana.

[Eric Morton]

Michael Williams, Groundless Belief

[Mendesrocha]

David Lewis, Convention

[Pierre]

It’s not philosophy, but Kotaro Suzumura’s Rational Choice, Collective Decisions, and Social Welfare (Cambridge 1983) is based on his PhD thesis. Despite not being philosophy, it is interesting for political philosophers interested in formal methods, and it crosses disciplinary boundaries by discussing Rawlsian social choice, the formalization of individual rights, and issues of distributive justice.

[David Morrow]

Wow. Thanks for compiling such an impressive list, everybody. I'm struck by how *good* a lot of these books are, although I suppose it's a heavily biased sample.

Thanks for the Suzumura reference, Pierre. I'm really interested in that sort of thing, but I didn't know about Suzumura.

[Lindsay Whiting]

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo started as a dissertation
https://amzn.to/3Ie1jEO