Sophie Grace Chappell (born Timothy David John Chappell; November 1964) is an English philosopher and academic. Since 2006, she has been Professor of Philosophy at the Open University. Early life and education Chappell was born in November 1964. She studied Literae humaniores at Magdalen College, Oxford, having been awarded the Anne Shaw Classical Scholarship. She achieved a first in Honour Moderations in March 1986 and an upper second in the Final Honour School in June 1988, thereby graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. She then moved to the University of Edinburgh to undertake research for a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree under the supervision of James Mackey and Dory Scaltsas. She completed her PhD in 1992 with a thesis titled "Aristotle and Augustine on voluntary action and freedom and weakness of the will". Academic career In 1991, Chappell returned to the University of Oxford and was a junior research fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford (1991–1994) and a lecturer in philosophy at Merton College, Oxford (1992–1994). She was then a lecturer at the University of East Anglia from 1994 to 1996 and at the University of Manchester 1996 to 1998. In 1998, she moved to the University of Dundee: she was promoted to senior lecturer in 2002 and to Reader in Philosophy in 2005. In May 2006, she joined the Open University as Professor of Philosophy and director of the Open University Ethics Centre. Thought Sophie Grace Chappell writes against the systematic ambitions of contemporary moral philosophy to be able to define "the whole and exclusive truth about the justification, explanation, evaluation, and prescription of moral beliefs, and to contain the materials for displacing or refuting most or all other systematic moral theories." Her work aligns with that of her teacher Bernard Williams, as well as Alasdair MacIntyre and Ludwig Wittgenstein. She offers a new definition of the human personhood, inspired by gender role theory. She criticizes the traditional definition of "man" and "woman" based on antenatal biological traits, arguing that the sexual forms of human individuals can be used to identify human animals, but not human personhood. This point of view draws upon the Aristotelian definition of the human being as a political animal, as well as the Christian notion of natural moral law, at least for those aspects which might be differentiated from a gendered perspective. Chappell introduces a distinction between passive and immediate moral perceptions vs