Margaret Gilbert (born 1942) is a British philosopher best known for her founding contributions to the analytic philosophy of social phenomena. She has also made substantial contributions to other philosophical fields including political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and ethics. She is currently a Distinguished Professor and the Abraham I. Melden Chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. Life Gilbert was born in the United Kingdom, the second and youngest child of Peter Gilbert, a north London jeweler, and his wife Miriam. The original family name Goldberg was Anglicised to Gilbert. All four of her grandparents had been born in the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia (today's Poland and Lithuania). She obtained a "double first" B.A. degree in Classics and Philosophy from Cambridge University and a B.Phil. and D.Phil. degree in Philosophy from Oxford University. From 1983 until 2006, she taught at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she was Professor of Philosophy, and is now Professor Emerita. As of Fall 2006, she holds the Abraham I. Melden Chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. She has been a visiting teacher and researcher at many academic institutions including Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, Wolfson College, Oxford, Technische Universität Dresden, King's College London, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, and regularly gives invited lectures in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Gilbert was married to noted philosopher Saul Kripke and is the sister of famed British historian Sir Martin Gilbert. In 2016, Margaret Gilbert was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2019 she was awarded the Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution by Phi Beta Kappa in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association. Works In her book On Social Facts (1989) Gilbert presented novel accounts of a number of central social phenomena in the context of critical reflections on proposals by the founders of sociology Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber and others, including the philosopher David Lewis. The phenomena discussed include social conventions, social groups in a central sense of the term, group languages, collective belief, and acting together. Gilbert argued that these were all 'plural subject phenomena'. In a summary passage she writes, with allusion to Rousseau, that "One is willing to be the member of a plural subject if one is willing,