Nancy Cartwright, as of 2005, held several academic positions, including professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics (since 1991); director of the LSE Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (since 1993); and professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California at San Diego (since 1998). She had also served on the faculty at the University of Maryland (1971–1973) and Stanford University (1973–1991). She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Cartwright first became widely known for the radical thesis, presented in her landmark 1983 collection of essays How the Laws of Physics Lie, that the fundamental laws of physics did not state truths about the world. The thesis is radical because philosophers have generally assumed that there is some set of underlying physical laws which...