| | 21 | Name: | Dr. Emerson Greenaway | | | Institution: | Free Library of Philadelphia | | | Year Elected: | 1960 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1906 | | | Death Date: | 4/8/90 | | | | |
| 22 | Name: | Dr. Joseph H. Greenberg | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 1975 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1915 | | | Death Date: | May 7, 2001 | | | | |
| 23 | Name: | Dr. Moshe Halbertal | | | Institution: | Hebrew University; New York University Law School | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1958 | | | | | | |
Moshe Halbertal is Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at Hebrew University and Gruss Professor of Law at the New York University Law School. He earned his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in 1989.
Moshe Halbertal is known for applying deep knowledge of ancient philosophical traditions to modern questions of democratic theory. He was a co-author of Israel’s military code of ethics and speaks widely on the current challenges confronting constitutional democracy. He spends every fall semester at New York University where, despite lacking a law degree, he is a tenured law professor. Colleagues there praise the insights he brings to questions of U.S. constitutional law. He has been a visiting professor at many U.S. law schools, including Yale, Harvard, and Penn.
His publications include: People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority, 1997; By Way of Truth: Nahmanides and the Creation of Tradition, 2006; Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications, 2007; (with D. Hartman) Judaism and the Challenges of Modern Life, 2007; On Sacrifice, 2012; Maimonides: Life and Thought, 2013; (with S. Holmes) The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel, 2017; The Birth of Doubt: Confronting Uncertainty in Early Rabbinic Literature, 2020. He won the Goldstein-Goren Book Award in 1997 and the National Jewish Book Award in 2013. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2021. | |
| 24 | Name: | Dr. Eric P. Hamp | | | Institution: | University of Chicago & University of Shkodër | | | Year Elected: | 1980 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1920 | | | Death Date: | February 17, 2019 | | | | | | |
Linguist Eric P. Hamp was born in England in 1920 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1954. He was associated with the University of Chicago from 1950, when he took the position of instructor, until the end of his career, when he was professor of Indo-European linguistics and Emeritus Professor of Linguistics. An authority on the Indo-European family of languages, Dr. Hamp approached languages ranging from Albanian and Celtic to Native American languages with both fine judgment and sophisticated control of data. He served as director of the Center for Balkan and Slavic Studies, presided over the Linguistic Society of America, and taught as a visiting professor at universities in Edinburgh, Belgrade, Copenhagen, and Bucharest. Dr. Hamp authored thousands of published works, including Glossary of American Technical Linguistic Usage (1966) and Language and Machines (1966). In 2015 he was awarded the Medal of Merit by the President of Kosova. Eric P. Hamp died February 17, 2019 in Traverse City, MI, at the age of 98. | |
| 25 | Name: | Dr. Henry M. Hoenigswald | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 1971 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1915 | | | Death Date: | June 16, 2003 | | | | |
| 26 | Name: | Dr. Vyacheslav V. Ivanov | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles & Russian State University for the Humanities | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | Death Date: | October 7, 2017 | | | | | | |
Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov was born in 1929 in Moscow. Thanks to his parents (a well-known Russian writer and an actress of the Meyerhold avant-garde theatre) and their friends, he received a traditional Russian education and began writing poems, essays and prose works at an early age (most of which were never published). He continued his education at Moscow University (in the departments of Romance and Germanic philology and Sanskrit and Indo-European Studies) and received his Ph.D. in Hittite and Indo-European linguistics in 1955. He then taught comparative and general linguistics there, until he was dismissed in 1958 because of his friendship with Boris Pasternak. Due to political reasons, for thirty years he was unable to travel abroad as the government denied him an official travel visa. Fortunately, he was still able to continue his research work at the Institutes of the Academy of Sciences. In 1988 he was invited to return to Moscow University where he then became Chair of the new Department of the Theory and History of World Culture and Director of its affiliated Research Institute. Amidst the new political trends in Russia, he was elected to serve in the Russian Congress of People's Deputies, representing the researchers from the Institutes of the Academy. He has been appointed to several academies in Russia, Latvia, Great Britain, and the United States. With several Moscow and Tartu friends, he co-founded the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics. In 1988, Professor Ivanov began teaching regularly at American universities - first at Yale University, then at Stanford University, and finally at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and in the Indo-European Studies Program. Ivanov shared his time between Los Angeles and Moscow, where he taught in the Russian State University for the Humanities. He authored more than fifteen books and 1,000 journal articles. From 1992 on, he was editor-in-chief of a new journal in Slavic studies: Elementa. Journal of Slavic Studies and Comparative Cultural Semiotics, which continues the tradition of the Moscow-Tartu school. Professor Ivanov also directed the Library of Foreign Literature in Moscow and played a central role in promoting the necessity of open access to information in the democratization of Russian society. In addition to his standing as one of the great minds in 20th century intellectual life, Professor Ivanov was one of the greatest defenders of human rights in his country. Vyacheslav Ivanov died on October 7, 2017 at the age of 88. | |
| 27 | Name: | Dr. Brian Joseph | | | Institution: | Ohio State University | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
Brian Daniel Joseph is currently Distinguished University Professor, Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of Slavic Languages and Linguistics, Professor of Linguistics, at the Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978 before beginning his career at Ohio State.
Brian Joseph’s illuminating introductory paper from our Spring 2017 meeting (now published in Proceedings 162, 1) synthesized the issues in reconciling the linguistic and DNA-derived evidence of the peopling of Europe with languages of the Indo-European family. His own prodigious research and publication as an Indo-Europeanist and Balkanologist has centered on the prehistory and history of Greek over its 3500 years and its complex, now millennium-old relations to languages of the other families of the region, principally Albanian, South Slavic, and Turkish. Bringing to this work a profound mastery of contemporary morphological and syntactic theory, his scholarship has decisively rejuvenated linguists’ sense of the unique internal coherence of language as a grammatical structure, yet one ever adapting to the sometimes complex, multilingual social conditions that sustain it. He is the defining master in his generation of theoretically informed historical linguistics. Author or co-author of over 250 substantial journal articles and book chapters, of seven published books and 19 edited volumes or special journal issues, Joseph has also served the entire field of linguistics as editor of its flagship journal, Language.
He is the author of: The Synchrony and Diachrony of the Balkan Infinitive: A Study in Areal, General, and Historical Linguistics, 1983 (reprint 2009); Morphology and Universals in Syntactic Change: Evidence from Medieval and Modern Greek, 1990; (with H. Hock) Language Change, Language History, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, 1996; The Modern Greek Weak Subject Pronoun τος, 2015; (with P. Pappas) Modern Greek – A Grammatical Sketch, 2016; (with V. Friedman) The Balkan Languages, 2018. He has edited: (with P. Postal) Studies in Relational Grammar 3, 1990; (with R. Janda) Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 2003; (with A. Ralli, M. Janse) Studies in Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory, 2011. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2004), American Association for the Advancement of Science (2007), Linguistic Society of America (2010) (vice-president/president-elect, 2018). Brian Joseph was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 28 | Name: | Dr. Philip Stuart Kitcher | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2018 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
I was born in the UK, where I had the good fortune to pursue my secondary education at Christ’s Hospital, one of Britain’s great charitable foundations. From there I went to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to study mathematics. In my final year, however, I switched to the history and philosophy of science, intending to specialize in the history of science. Reading T.S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions inspired a further change, and led me to Princeton and to a Ph.D in the philosophy of science.
My early research concentrated on the philosophy of mathematics, and on general issues in philosophy of science, particularly those raised by Kuhn’s work. But, at the very beginning of my teaching career, undergraduates in my class on philosophy of science urged me to discuss biology (a subject about which I had been completely ignorant). Responding to their concerns, I quickly became fascinated. Thanks to a grant from the ACLS, I was able to supplement my reading with a year at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, where I learned much from Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Ernst Mayr. During the 1980s, I wrote extensively on topics in the philosophy of biology. My more general work in the philosophy of science culminated in The Advancement of Science, published in 1993.
Shortly thereafter, the Library of Congress invited me to spend a year writing a report on the implications of the Human Genome Project. The work I did in this area (much of it published in 1996 in The Lives to Come) changed my views about what philosophers of science ought to be doing. I began to see the sciences as embedded within societies, to whose legitimate aims they are partially responsible. Two books, Science, Truth, and Democracy (2001) and Science in a Democratic Society (2011), have tried to probe the relations between the sciences and the human good.
The shift in my thinking was accompanied by a new concentration on ethics, and an attempt to understand how ethical life might fit within an evolutionary picture of our species. Here I was greatly aided by conversations with Sidney Morgenbesser, who helped me to see the kinship between my views and those of John Dewey. Dewey’s pragmatism has left deep imprints in my more recent writings, not only in The Ethical Project (2011) and Preludes to Pragmatism (2012), but also in my discussions of religion (Living with Darwin, 2007, and Life After Faith, 2014). Since coming to Columbia in 1999, the wonderful interdisciplinary intellectual environment has quickened my long-standing interests in music and literature, leading me to write on Wagner, Mahler, Joyce, and Thomas Mann.
I’m currently engaged in several attempts to elaborate a Deweyan pragmatism for our century, by supplying a general framework and focusing on education, democracy, and moral progress. I hope to have enough time not only to complete these projects, but also for further philosophical explorations of literary and musical works. I trust my long - and winding - intellectual journey is not yet finished. With luck, there will be a few more bends and surprises. - Philip Kitcher
Philip Kitcher was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2018. He has also earned many other honors, including the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Psychological Association and the Prometheus prize of the American Philosophical Association. In 2020 he was awarded the Rescher Medal for contributions to systematic philosophy. In 2021 he was awarded the 2020 2020 Hempel Award, "recognizing outstanding lifetime achievement in the philosophy of science" and published two books, Moral Progress (June) and The Main Enterprise of the World: Rethinking Education (November). | |
| 29 | Name: | Mr. Saul A. Kripke | | | Institution: | The Graduate Center of the City University of New York; Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | Death Date: | September 15, 2022 | | | | | | |
Saul Kripke is professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University. He earned a B.A. from Harvard University in 1962 and was a Harvard Junior Fellow from 1963-67 before becoming professor of philosophy at Rockefeller University. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1976. Saul Kripke's work has significantly changed the way we look at fundamental philosophical problems today. His 1972 lectures at Princeton University, published as Naming and Necessity (1980), shattered a centuries-old consensus on the nature of the fundamental semantical concepts of connotation and reference, as well as challenging received ideas about necessity and contingency. On the technical side, Kripke transformed the subjects of modal and intuitionistic logic. He has also made fundamental contributions to set theory and generalized recursion theory, and to Boolean Algebra. Subsequently he proposed the first new formal theory of truth since Alfred Tarski's epochal work in the 1930s. He also proposed a radically new interpretation of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, one which continues to be at the center of virtually every discussion of that famous work. Kripke delivered Oxford University's John Locke Lectures in 1973-74 and was awarded the Swedish Academy of Sciences' Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 2001. Saul Kripke was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2004. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Nebraska, Omaha (1977), Johns Hopkins University (1997) the University of Haifa (1998) and the University of Pennsylvania (2005). | |
| 30 | Name: | Dr. Sandra Laugier | | | Institution: | Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1961 | | | | |
| 31 | Name: | Dr. Jonathan Lear | | | Institution: | Universiy of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
Jonathan Lear is currently John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He earned his Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1978. He started his career in Clare College at University of Cambridge and moved to Yale University, including as Kingman Brewster Professor of the Humanities, before ending up at the University of Chicago.
Jonathan Lear has, over the last twenty years, consistently been the leading defender of the philosophical dimensions of psychoanalytic theory, bringing out a level of sophistication and rigor in Freud’s thought often neglected in conventional criticisms. One might say that his major topic in a great deal of his work has been how to account for human irrationality in thought and action, and the bearing of the inescapable fact of irrationality on conceptions of how to live well. Both inside and outside philosophy he is probably best known for his extraordinary 2006 book, Radical Hope, on one level an investigation about how the Crow nation survived the dissolution of their traditional way of life, and on another level an exploration of what a collective form of life could be that it could “die out,” and what one might be called on to do in situations of potential cultural despair.
His honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987-88) and a Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2011-14). He is a member of American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2017). He has authored: Aristotle and Logical Theory, 1980, 2010; Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, 1988; Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis, 1990, 1999; Open Minded: Working Out The Logic of the Soul, 1998; Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life, 2000; Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony, 2003; Freud, 2005, 2015; Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, 2006; The Idea of a Philosophical Anthropology: The Spinoza Lectures, 2017; Wisdom Won From Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, 2017. Jonathan Lear was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 32 | Name: | Dr. Floyd Glenn Lounsbury | | | Institution: | Yale University | | | Year Elected: | 1987 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1914 | | | Death Date: | 5/14/98 | | | | |
| 33 | Name: | Dr. Alasdair MacIntyre | | | Institution: | London Metropolitan University; University of Notre Dame | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | | | | |
Alasdair MacIntyre was born in Scotland in 1929. Although his roots are in the North of Ireland and the West of Scotland, he was largely educated in England, doing his undergraduate work in classics at Queen Mary College (University of London) - of which he is now a Fellow - and his graduate work in philosophy at the University of Manchester. He taught at various British universities, including Oxford and Essex, until 1970, when he emigrated to the United States. In 1966, he published A Short History of Ethics and in 1967 Secularization and Moral Change, his Riddell lectures at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne. Since 1970, he has taught at a number of American universities, including Duke University, where from 1995-2000 he was Arts and Sciences Professor of Philosophy, and the University of Notre Dame to which he returned in the Fall of 2000 as a Research Professor. Among his books are After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues (1990), his Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University in 1990, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1988, and Dependent Rational Animals (1999). In 1984, he was the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. He has received honorary degrees from Swarthmore College, the Queen's University of Belfast, the University of Essex, Williams College, the New School for Social Research, Marquette University, the University of Aberdeen, and St. Patrick's University, Maynooth. He is an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. | |
| 34 | Name: | Dr. Charles H. Malik | | | Year Elected: | 1958 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1906 | | | Death Date: | 12/28/87 | | | | |
| 35 | Name: | Dr. Avishai Margalit | | | Institution: | Hebrew University of Jerusalem | | | Year Elected: | 2018 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | | | | |
Avishai Margalit is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has done important philosophical work on language, rationality, politics, and morality. Though he uses analytical methods, he is notable within analytic philosophy for drawing on the complexity of historical examples and cultural context. One of his most significant contributions is his argument that politics focuses on avoiding evil rather than pursuing the good, and thus that the goal of a decent society that is free of humiliation is prior to the goal of the just society. In addition to his academic work, Avishai Margalit is a public representative of philosophy. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books since 1984. He has at various times been involved in work towards and promotion of peace in Israel and Palestine. Avishai Margalit was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2018. | |
| 36 | Name: | Dr. Manfred Mayrhofer | | | Institution: | University of Vienna | | | Year Elected: | 1992 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | October 31, 2011 | | | | | | |
Professor Emeritus at the University of Vienna, Manfred Mayrhofer is a noted Indo-Europeanist specializing in Indo-Iranian languages. Renowned for his etymological dictionary of Sanskrit, he studied Indo-European and Semitic linguistics along with philosophy at the University of Graz, Austria, which awarded him a Ph.D. in 1951. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Vienna in 1962, Dr. Mayrhofer taught at the Universities of Wurzburg and Saarbrucken. He is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America. Manfred Mayhofer died October 31, 2011, at age 86 in Vienna. | |
| 37 | Name: | Dr. Salikoko S. Mufwene | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and the College at the University of Chicago, where he also serves on the Committee of Evolutionary Biology, the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the Committee on African Studies. He was conferred the honorary title of Extraordinary Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa for 2018-2021. Mufwene refers to his research as evolutionary linguistics, in which he approaches language evolution from an ecological perspective, finding inspiration in macroecology and population genetics. The research focuses on the phylogenetic emergence of languages, language speciation, and language endangerment and loss (LEL). The interest in speciation started with the emergence of creoles, which he extended to that of other forms of the indigenization of European languages in the colonies. He conceives of languages as communication technologies developed through the exaptation of the hominin anatomy by the brain in response to especially changing population structures. The complexity of languages as technologies can be correlated with that of the mind that produces them and has arisen incrementally over the past half million years or so. The power of the mind itself is the outcome of how the brain itself has evolved concurrently with ongoing changes in the hominin anatomy. Human mental capacity accounts generally for the complexity of the cultures that have emerged in different populations, by contrast with what we know of the cultures of other animals.
Mufwene has published over 300 journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews. His many authored and (co-)edited books include: Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties – editor (the University of Georgia Press, 1993); African-American English: Structure, history and use, co- edited with John Rickford, Guy Bailey, & John Baugh (Routledge, included among the linguistics classics of the Publisher); The Ecology of Language Evolution (CUP, 2001—translated into Mandarin and included among the classics of the Commercial Press in linguistics, in China); Créoles, écologie sociale, évolution linguistique: cours donnés au Collège de France durant l’automne 2003 (L’Harmattan, 2005); Polymorphous linguistics: Jim McCawley’s legacy – co-edited with Elaine J. Francis and Rebecca S. Wheeler (MIT Press, 2005); Language Evolution: Contact, competition and change (Continuum Press, 2008); Globalization and language vitality: Perspectives from Africa, co-edited with Cécile B. Vigouroux (Continuum Press, 2008); Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America – editor (the University of Chicago Press, 2014); Colonisation, globalisation, vitalité du français – co-edited with Cécile B. Vigouroux (Odile Jacob, 2014); Complexity in language: Developmental and evolutionary perspectives – co-edited with Christophe Coupé & François Pellegrino (CUP, 2017); Bridging Linguistics and Economics – co-edited with Cécile B. Vigouroux (CUP, 2020); and The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, 2 volumes – co-edited with Anna María Escobar (June 2022). Mufwene is the founding editor of the book series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact (2001-) and has been invited to edit the book series Cambridge Elements in Language Contact (still in preparation).
Mufwene is a Native of the now Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly the Republic of Zaïre), where he completed his BA in English Philology at the Université Nationale du Zaïre at Lubumbashi, with Highest Honors, in 1973. He enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1974 for his graduate training and earned his PhD, with distinction, in 1979. His dissertation was in Generative Semantics, perhaps one of the last dissertations in this research paradigm. He went to work at the University of the West Indies, at Mona, Jamaica (Jan 1980 – July 1981); and there he retooled himself to do creole linguistics, focusing first on structures of these new vernaculars and then shifting gradually to the subject matter of their emergence. In September 1981, he moved to the University of Georgia, where, reading literature in both chaos theory and evolutionary biology, he started developing his ecological approach to the emergence of creoles and compared the case of English creoles with that of Indigenized Englishes in former British exploitation colonies of Africa and Asia. Since Dec. 1991, he has been teaching at the University of Chicago and chaired its Department of Linguistics from 1995 to 2001.
The growing linguistics interest in LEL prompted him to undertake research on globalization and language. This is an expansion of his ecological approach to language evolution. Focusing on language birth and death, he has questioned the claim that worldwide globalization has been the driver of these evolutionary processes. According to him, worldwide globalization provides remote causes; the real actuators of language speciation and the concurrent LEL are local, produced by the local population structures, including the relevant socioeconomic systems. The approach can explain why the linguistic effects of colonization of the world by Europeans have varied not only between the settlement and exploitation colonies but also from one polity to another, including territories colonized in the same style. In some places, one must also factor in layers of colonization of differing styles such as in South Africa. Mufwene is now revising a book typescript on the subject matter. He is an advocate of decolonial linguistics.
Mufwene was a visiting professor at the Université Jean-Moulin, Lyon, France (Fall 1989); the University of the West Indies at Mona (summer 2001); the National University of Singapore (fall 2001); Harvard University (spring 2002); le Collège de France (fall 2003); Université de Paris, Sorbonne (fall 2004); Institut Universitaire de France (April & May 2006); University of São Paulo (June 2009); and Nanyang Technological University (spring 2018); among a few other places. He was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Lyon, France (Oct. 2011 - June 2011), taught 4 times at the Summer Institute of Linguistic Society of America (1999, 2005, 2015, 2017); and was inducted Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018. In 2021 colleagues and friends from different disciplines celebrated his interdisciplinary scholarship with a Festschrift titled Variation rolls the dice: A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene, ed. by Enoch Oladé Aboh and Cécile B. Vigouroux (John Benjamins). | |
| 38 | Name: | Dr. Thomas Nagel | | | Institution: | New York University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | | |
Thomas Nagel was born in Yugoslavia in 1937. After earning his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1963, he served on the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and New York University, where he is currently Professor of Philosophy and Law and University Professor. He was awarded the Balzan Prize for Moral Philosophy in 2008. Among his writings in philosophy of mind, Dr. Nagel's 1974 essay "What is it like to be a bat?" defended an antireductionist position about the problem of consciousness. He is one of the half dozen most respected moral philosophers in the world. While defending the possibility of objective reasoning about value, he has never ignored the role of subjective reasons, and, with the late Bernard Williams, he pioneered the discussion of "moral luck." He is simultaneously a humanistic and an analytic philosopher, and he shows that there is no contradiction involved in being both. | |
| 39 | Name: | Dr. Alexander Nehamas | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Nehamas writes beautifully on a wide range of topics from the most technical issues in ancient philosophy and the philosophy of Nietzsche to questions about painting, poetry, television, and friendship that speak to both the professional philosopher and the educated lay reader. He combines a scrupulous attention to philology and textual criticism with a rare capacity to address the kinds of big questions about what it is to live a virtuous life that have engaged the best of the western philosophical tradition since Plato. His Gifford Lectures, now expanded into a forthcoming book on friendship, are in the tradition of James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (the first Gifford lectures), in that both address the most fundamental of human interests. Nehamas has been widely recognized for his distinction. | |
| 40 | Name: | Dr. Susan Neiman | | | Institution: | Einstein Forum | | | Year Elected: | 2018 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
Susan Neiman has been Director of the Einstein Forum since 2000. She works primarily in moral and political philosophy as well as in the history of philosophy, particularly the 18th century. Much of her work has been devoted to defending the Enlightenment against its caricatures. Her books have been translated into ten languages. They include Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Fremde Sehen Anders, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grownup Idealists, Why Grow Up?, and Widerstand der Vernunft. She is also the author of many essays, and regularly writes political and cultural commentary for German and American media. Recent awards include the International Spinoza Prize and the Tanner Lectureship at the University of Michigan. In 2019 she received the Volkmar and Margret Sander Prize from Deutsches Haus NYU. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften. Previously, she taught philosophy at Yale University and Tel Aviv University. She received her A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she studied under John Rawls and Stanley Cavell, before studying at the Freie Universität-Berlin under Margherita von Brentano and Jakob Taubes. Neiman is the mother of three grown children, and lives in Berlin. | |
| |