| | 1 | Name: | Sir Isaiah Berlin | | | Institution: | All Souls College | | | Year Elected: | 1975 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1909 | | | Death Date: | 11/5/97 | | | | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Judith Butler | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1956 | | | | | | |
Grounded in Continental philosophy, Judith Butler has become one of the most influential voices in the fields of feminist theory, literary criticism, social theory, ethics, and psychoanalysis. Her best-known book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, became a founding text for theoretical work in gender and sexuality through its critical readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray. Perhaps the book's most significant choice was the use of J. L. Austin's concept of performativity as the basis for an understanding of the development of a gendered subjectivity not dependent on biological givens. Performativity becomes an increasingly powerful and flexible conceptual tool in Butler's subsequent, nuanced work on iterability and citation. Responding to postmodern and post-structuralist critiques of the self-evidence of identity, Dr. Butler has emerged as a public intellectual through her rigorous exploration of non-foundationalist approaches to issues of rights and representation.
Over the past decade, her work has increasingly moved outward from gender and sexuality (while not letting go of its emphasis on those issues) to encompass broader questions of human rights, social theory, and ethics. Her more recent books explore hate speech, the politics of kinship, the problematics of universalism, and the efficacy and limitations of self-knowledge in the context of inequality. Those publications include Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000); (with E. Laclau, S. Zizek) Hegemony, Contingency, Universality (2000); Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). Judith Butler was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award for exemplary contributions to scholarship in the humanities in 2008. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019). She has been Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Berkeley since 1993. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and has also served on the faculties of Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins Universities. Judith Butler was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2007. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Stanley Cavell | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | June 19, 2018 | | | | | | |
Stanley Cavell was one of the most distinguished and most independent American philosophers of the last half-century. His major interests center on the relation of the analytical tradition (especially the work of Austin and Wittgenstein) with key figures of the Continental tradition (for example, Heidegger and Nietzsche); with American philosophy (especially Emerson and Thoreau); and with the arts (for example, Shakespeare, film, and opera). At a time when one hears the fear that American philosophy is limiting itself to philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of language and logic and European philosophy is dominated by Postmodernism, Dr. Cavell was perhaps the outstanding example of a philosopher who is simultaneously humanistic and rigorous. The extent of his influence was testified to by the fact that he had been the subject of books and collections of papers in the United States, England, Germany, France, Spain and Japan. In 1997 Dr. Cavell became Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value Emeritus at Harvard University, where he had taught since 1963. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1961 and was a Junior Fellow in Harvard's Society of Fellows from 1953 to 1956. He earned his A.B. in music at the University of California, Berkeley in 1947 and returned to Berkeley as an assistant professor of philosophy from 1956 to 1962. Stanley Cavell died June 19, 2018, at the age of 91 in Boston, Massachusetts. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Regna Darnell | | | Institution: | University of Western Ontario | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Regna Darnell is today the leading historian of North American linguistics and anthropology, from its founding by pioneers like Daniel Brinton and Franz Boas, to Edward Sapir and the modern field of ethnographic linguistics. She is one of Canada's most widely published authorities on First Nations languages and cultures, having conducted fieldwork across the continent with speakers of Algonkian, Athabascan, and Iroquoian languages. Her work represents a unique synthesis of hardminded ethnographic and linguistic description with the sensitivity of the humanistic tradition, bridging the gap between a postmodernist appreciation of cultural uniqueness and a scientific insistence on verifiable observation. Dr. Darnell holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1969) and has taught anthropology at the University of Alberta (1969-90) and the University of Western Ontario (1990-), where she is currently Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology. Her publications include Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist (1990); Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist Anthropology (1998); and Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology (2001). She won the 2020 Lifetime Service Award from the Women’s Caucus, Canadian Anthropology Society and the 2020 Lifetime Service Award from the American Society for Ethnohistory. She published History of Anthropology: A Critical Window on the Discipline in North America (2021), she will publish Method and Theory in the History of Anthropology (2022), and she edited the forthcoming Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Donald Davidson | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1985 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1917 | | | Death Date: | August 31, 2003 | | | | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Ronald Dworkin | | | Institution: | New York University; University College, Oxford | | | Year Elected: | 2008 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | Death Date: | February 14, 2013 | | | | | | |
Ronald Dworkin was Professor of Philosophy and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, Oxford. He received his L.L.B. from Harvard Law School in 1957 and went on to clerk for Judge Learned Hand. He taught at Yale University Law School from 1962-69, serving as Holhfeld Professor of Law, and from 1969-98 was Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and Fellow of University College. In 1994 he was awarded the American Philosophical Society's Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence in recognition of "his book Law's Empire and his other jurisprudential writings over the past quarter century." His 2007 award of the Holberg Prize confirmed more widely what Dworkin's professional colleagues have come to take for granted: that there is no more influential thinker now at work in the fields radiating from the intersections of moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law. With the publication of Rawls' Theory of Justice, moral philosophy was brought back to the center of philosophical study, and Dworkin has expanded its reach both by essentially linking the interpretation of law with the perspective of morality, and by his unique position as a public intellectual. The position is unique in demonstrating in practice one of Dworkin's guiding ideas, namely that freedom of speech is fundamental to that responsibility for civic conversation apart from which society cannot know itself, that is, know what it values politically. Ronald Dworkin's publications include Taking Rights Seriously (1977); A Matter of Principle (1985); Law's Empire (1986); Philosophical Issues in Senile Dementia (1987); A Bill of Rights for Britain (1990); Life's Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia and Individual Freedom (1993); Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (1996); Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (2000); and Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (2006). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1979). Ronald Dworkin was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. He died on February 14, 2013, at the age of 81 in London. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Didier Fassin | | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
Didier Fassin is a French anthropologist and sociologist. He is James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études in Paris. He has recently been elected at the Collège de France to a permanent Chair named “Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies”.
Initially trained as a physician in Paris, he practiced internal medicine as an infectious disease specialist at the Hospital Pitié-Salpétrière and taught public health at the University Pierre et Marie Curie. He also worked as a medical doctor in India and Tunisia. Later shifting to social science, he received his M.A. in anthropology from La Sorbonne, and his PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, writing his thesis on power relations and health inequalities in Senegal.
After having been granted a fellowship by the French Institute for Andean Studies to investigate maternal mortality and living conditions among Indian women in Ecuador, he became assistant professor of sociology in 1991 at the University of Paris North. There, he created CRESP, the Center for Research on Social and Health Issues, working on several public health problems such as the history of child lead poisoning in France and the politics of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Appointed as Professor of sociology at the University of Paris North in 1997, he was elected two years later as Director of studies in anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. In 2007, he founded IRIS, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Social Sciences, in an effort to bring together anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists and legal scholars around contemporary political and social issues. He himself developed a long-term program exploring the multiple facets of humanitarianism in local and international policies, especially towards the poor, immigrant and refugees, as well as victims of violence and epidemics. In parallel, he launched a research project on borders and boundaries in an attempt to articulate the issues around immigration and racialization.
In 2008, he received an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for his program Towards a Critical Moral Anthropology, which he developed with a team of twelve anthropologists and sociologists. To reappraise theoretical issues in the analysis of morals and ethics, he himself conducted ethnographic research on police, justice and prison in France. In 2009, he succeeded Clifford Geertz at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, and became the first James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science. His inaugural public lecture was entitled “Critique of Humanitarian Reason”. In 2010, he became Visiting Professor at the Universities of Princeton and Hong Kong. A year later, he created a Summer Program in Social Science for earlier-career scholars from Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, on the basis of two-year sessions, the first one in Princeton, the second one in the Global South.
In France, he has been involved in the politics of science, as a member of the Scientific Council of INSERM, the National Institute for Health and Medical Research, of the Ethics Committee of INRA, the National Institute for Agronomic Research, and of the Scientific Council of the City of Paris. In 2006, he became the chair of the Committee for Humanities and Social Science in the French National Agency for Research. In the United States, as a member of the Committee of World Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association appointed in 2010, he was committed to the global circulation of knowledge and the reduction of the gap between the North and the South in the development of social science. And as a guest advisor of the New Jersey Criminal Sentencing and Disposition Commission, he has contributed since 2018 to the reform of the state penal and penitentiary system.
His research on punishment was the matter of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley, and his reflection on life was the topic of his Adorno Lectures, at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. He also gave the inaugural Lemkin Lecture at Rutgers University on resentment and ressentiment, the Tumin Lecture at Princeton University on the life of things, the Eric Wolf Lecture at the University of Vienna on conspiracy theories, and the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia on crisis. He developed a theoretical analysis of the public presence of the social sciences, which he presented in his recipient lecture for the Gold Medal in anthropology at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award he has been granted has allowed him to conduct a multi-sited research exploring the ubiquitous notion of crisis and its multiple meanings from a global perspective. Appointed in 2019 at the Annual Chair in Public Health at the Collège de France he gave his inaugural lecture on the inequality of lives. In 2021, he was elected at the Academia Europaea and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liège.
Apart from his academic career, he has participated in various solidarity non-governmental organizations in France, in particular as Administrator and later Vice-president of MSF, Doctors Without Borders, from 1999 to 2003, and as President of COMEDE, the Medical Committee for the Exiles since 2006. Following the publication of his book on urban policing, he was requested to testify as amicus curiae in the first French lawsuit against racial discrimination in law enforcement. He is a frequent contributor to various media, in France to national radio programs, newspapers and magazines, such as France Culture, Le Monde, Libération and Alternatives économiques, and occasionally writes for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, among others.
His publications include: as editor, Contemporary States of Emergency. The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (with Mariella Pandolfi, Zone Books, 2010), Moral Anthropology. A Companion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), Moral Anthropology; A Critical Reader (Routledge, 2014), Writing the World of Policing. The Difference Ethnography Makes (The University of Chicago Press, 2017), If Truth Be Told. The Politics of Public Ethnography (Duke University Press, 2017), A Time for Critique (with Bernard Harcourt, Columbia University Press, 2018), Deepening Divides. How Physical Borders and Social Boundaries Delineates our World (Pluto Press, 2020), Words and Worlds. A Lexicon for Dark Times (with Veena Das, Duke University Press, 2021), Pandemic Exposures. Economy and Society in the Time of Coronavirus (with Marion Fourcade, Hau Books, 2021), Crisis Under Critique. How People Assess, Transform and Respond to Critical Situations (with Axel Honneth, Columbia University Press, 2022), and La Société qui vient (Seuil, 2022); as author, When Bodies Remember. Politics and Experience of AIDS in South Africa (University of California Press, 2007), The Empire of Trauma. An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (with Richard Rechtman, Princeton University Press, 2009), Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present (University of California Press, 2011), Enforcing Order. An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Polity, 2013), At the Heart of the State. The Moral World of Institutions (with Yasmine Bouagga et al., Pluto, 2015), Four Lectures on Ethics. Anthropological Perspectives (with Michael Lambek, Veena Das & Webb Keane, Hau Books, 2015), Prison Worlds. An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (Polity, 2016), Life. A Critical User’s Manual (Polity, 2018), The Will to Punish (Oxford University Press, 2018), Policing the City. An Ethno-Graphic (with Frédéric Debomy and Jake Raynal, Other Press, 2021), Death of a Traveller. A Counter Investigation (Polity, 2021), Les Mondes de la santé publique. Excursions anthropologiques. Cours au Collège de France (Seuil, 2021). His books have been translated into eight languages. | |
| 8 | Name: | Prof. Eugenio Garin | | | Institution: | Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento | | | Year Elected: | 1972 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1909 | | | Death Date: | December 29, 2004 | | | | |
| 9 | Name: | Dr. Carl G. Hempel | | | Institution: | Princeton University & University of Pittsburgh | | | Year Elected: | 1966 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1905 | | | Death Date: | 11/9/97 | | | | |
| 10 | Name: | Dr. Caroline Humphrey | | | Institution: | University of Cambridge | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Caroline Humphrey is, clear and away, the foremost Western social anthropologist working on the Soviet Union/Russia, said no less an authority than fellow APS member Clifford Geertz, who reviewed Humphrey's classic work on the social and cultural complexities of a Siberian collective for the New Republic. Her wide-ranging scholarship of Asian populations and Mongol shamanism have further consolidated her position as the pre-eminent social anthropologist in her field. She is particularly known for her work on nomadic life in East Asia, its decline and the changing status of women in those societies; Russia's new criminal class; as well as her long interest in the Jain society, an ancient, ritualistic, non-Brahminical East Indian sect. Dr. Humphrey's fluency in Russian and Mongolian and her understanding of Tibetan, Hindi and Napali have further assisted her penetrating studies. Equally remarkable are her communication skills among scholars and the public, whether by lectures or through widely-acclaimed documentary films. Dr. Humphrey is a Fellow of King's College and has served as Sigrid Rausing Professor of Collaborative Anthropology at Cambridge since 2006. She has won the Staley Prize in Anthropology (1990), the Royal Anthropological Institute's Rivers Memorial Medal (1999) and the Heldt Prize (2002) and is the author of Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in Siberian Collective Farm (1983); Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Daur Mongols (1996); and (with D. Sneath) The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia (1999). | |
| 11 | Name: | Dr. Thomas S. Kuhn | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1922 | | | Death Date: | 6/17/96 | | | | |
| 12 | Name: | Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrmann | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | | |
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic. She uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences, the way they are shaped by ideas about minds and persons, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help those whose voices are distressing. At the heart of the work is the sense of being called, and its possibilities and burden.
She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007. When God Talks Back was named a NYT Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. It was awarded the $100,000 Grawemeyer Prize for Religion by the University of Louisville. She has published over thirty OpEds in The New York Times, and her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Science News, and many other publications. She is the author of Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, The Good Parsi, Of Two Minds, When God Talks Back, Our Most Troubling Madness, and How God Becomes Real and other books, and is currently at work on a book entitled Voices. | |
| 13 | Name: | Dr. Hilary Putnam | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1999 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | March 13, 2016 | | | | | | |
Hilary W. Putnam is the Cogan University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty of Harvard, he was Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has also taught at Northwestern University and Princeton University (in both the Philosophy Department and Mathematics Departments). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles as well as several honorary degrees. Dr. Putnam is past president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), the Philosophy of Science Association, and the Association for Symbolic Logic. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and of the British Academy. His books include three volumes of Philosophical Papers published by Cambridge University Press, a book on mind, language and computers titled Representation and Reality, and two volumes of collected papers published by Harvard University Press under the titles Realism with a Human Face and Words and Life. His new book, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World has just been published by Columbia University Press. Dr. Putnam was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1998. | |
| 14 | Name: | Dr. Willard Van O. Quine | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1957 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1908 | | | Death Date: | December 25, 2000 | | | | |
| 15 | Name: | Dr. John Rawls | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1921 | | | Death Date: | November 24, 2002 | | | | |
| 16 | Name: | Dr. Richard Rorty | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | Death Date: | June 8, 2007 | | | | |
| 17 | Name: | Dame Anne Salmond | | | Institution: | University of Auckland | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | | | | |
Anne Salmond is New Zealand’s most eminent scholar in social anthropology, ethnohistory, and Maori studies. Her research draws on structural linguistics, semantic anthropology, long-term ethnographic fieldwork at Maori ceremonial gatherings, and documentary and oral historical techniques, all used to establish key principles that have structured Maori and other Pacific peoples’ economics, social organization, rituals, and maintenance of group identity over the long course of encounters with European explorers and settlers in their cultural worlds. A public intellectual in the best sense of that term, Salmond is one of a small number of social scientists whose work can be truly said to have shaped thinking about the structure and nature of social and cultural relationships in New Zealand and the wider Pacific. Out of her studies of Maori and Pacific philosophies and ways of living engaged by European Enlightenment science and philosophies, and their Pacific legacies, she has awakened interest in new ways of resolving how cutting edge science can address environmental issues and issues of ecological restoration. Her latest work is Tears of Rangi: Exeriments Across Worlds (2017). | |
| 18 | Name: | Dr. Frank H. Stewart | | | Institution: | The Hebrew University | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
By discipline an anthropologist, Frank Stewart is a creative and rigorous thinker in Middle Eastern studies. He was Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University 1994 to 2009. Stewart's two volumes of texts on Sinai Bedouin law are the first installments of an exceptionally deep study of a customary (non-Shari'a) legal system that is unlikely to last much longer, and they are also a significant contribution to Arabic linguistics. No other researcher has been able to study a legal system based on unwritten law in such depth. In addition to his core work on the Middle East, he has also written on the historical anthropology of North American Indians, on age-group systems across the world (also of interest to some economists), and on the concept of honor (also of interest to philosophers - the book was reviewed in Mind). The article on Schuld and Haftung is a contribution to comparative law published in the leading journal of German legal history. | |
| 19 | Name: | Dame Marilyn Strathern | | | Institution: | University of Cambridge | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Marilyn Strathern describes herself as a conventional social anthropologist. A product of the Cambridge School of Social Anthropology at its heyday in the 1960s, she carried out fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, her texts reflecting issues largely within the discipline rather than outside it (Mary Douglas once called her -- not altogether flatteringly -- ‘an anthropologist’s anthropologist’). These days she has an interdisciplinary audience.
Strathern’s interests have been fairly consistently divided between Melanesian and British ethnography. She is probably most well known for The gender of the gift (1988), a critique of anthropological theories of society and gender relations applied to Melanesia, which she herself pairs with After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century (1992), a comment on the cultural revolution at home. Her most experimental work is an exercise on the comparative method called Partial connections (1991). Projects over the last twenty five years are reflected in publications on reproductive technologies, intellectual and cultural property rights and interdisciplinarity, although it is her brief work on regimes of audit and accountability that has attracted most widespread attention. Some of these themes are brought together in Kinship, law and the unexpected (2005). Papua New Guinea is never far from her concerns, her most recent visit to Mt Hagen being in 2015.
Her first departmental position was at the University of Manchester, UK. Now an emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Strathern retired from the Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology in 2008 and from being head of Cambridge’s Girton College in 2009. A fellow of the British Academy since 1987, she received a national honour (DBE) in 2001, and is currently (hon.) Life President of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth. | |
| 20 | Name: | Dr. Judith Jarvis Thomson | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | Death Date: | November 20, 2020 | | | | | | |
Judith Jarvis Thomson was Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1959. Her teaching career includes Barnard College, Boston University, and as Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Judith Jarvis Thomson has been a leading contributor to the flourishing of moral and political philosophy in America since the 1960s. She is best known for her defense of abortion and for her subtle and pioneering use of “trolley problem” thought experiments as a tool for understanding interpersonal morality, which has set the agenda, and provided a model, for much subsequent work. Thomson’s ingenious use of examples, and her rigorous yet extremely readable style, have made her writing widely influential. Her important book, The Realm of Rights, used this same method of argument from carefully crafted examples to develop a general account of morality based on rights, drawing important connections between morality and law, particularly the theory of torts. Thomson was one of a small number of women philosophers to rise to great prominence in the field in the second half of the twentieth century, paving the way for many others.
She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987-88) and the Quinn Prize of the American Philosophical Association in 2012. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1989) and the American Philosophical Association (president, Eastern Division, 1992-93). Her works include Acts and Other Events (1977), Rights, Restitution, and Risk (1986), The Realm of Rights (1990), and Normativity (2008). Judith Jarvis Thomson was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. She died on November 20, 2020. | |
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