J.B. Schneewind is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University.

He received his B.A. from Cornell and his Ph.D. from Princeton. Schneewind taught at Chicago, Princeton, Yale, and Hunter College CUNY before coming to Hopkins as chair of the philosophy department in 1981. He has also taught at Leicester, Stanford, and Helsinki. He has held Mellon, Guggenheim, and NEH fellowships and spent 1992-1993 as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. He is a past president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Schneewind has edited several books, among them a two-volume collection of source material, Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant, a translation of Kant's Lectures on Ethics for the Cambridge University Press edition of Kant in English, and a collection of essays on philanthropy. His own writings include, in addition to many articles, two main books: Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (1977), and The Invention of Autonomy (1998). He taught courses on the history of ethics, types of ethical theory, the British empiricists, Kant's ethics, and utopian thought.