Wiggins read philosophy at Brasenose College, Oxford, and had J. L. Ackrill as a tutor. He was the Wykeham Professor of Logic from 1993 to 2000. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1999 to 2000. He is Fellow of the British Academy, and Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

According to philosopher Harold Noonan:

The most influential part of Wiggins's work has been in metaphysics, where he has developed a fundamentally Aristotelian conception of substance, enriched by insights drawn from Putnam (1975) and Kripke (1980). His works also contain influential discussions of the problem of personal identity, which Wiggins elucidates via a conception that he calls the "Animal Attribute View."

Books

• Ethics. Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Cambridge, 2006)
• Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford, 1987; second edition 1998)
• Sameness and Substance Renewed (Cambridge, 2001)
• Sameness and Substance (Oxford, 1980)
• Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life (Proceedings of the British Academy)
• Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Oxford, 1967)

Articles

• "A Sensible Subjectivism?" (Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 185-214)
• "Towards a reasonable libertarianism" (Essays on Freedom of Action, 1973 - Routledge & Kegan Paul)
• "Weakness of Will Commensurability, and the Objects of Deliberation and Desire" (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1978)
• "On Sentence-sense, Word-sense and Difference of Word-sense: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Dictionaries" (1971) (link)