| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Hans Aarsleff | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1925 | | | | | | |
Hans Aarsleff was born near Copenhagen, Denmark in 1925. He attended local schools and graduated cum laude from nearby state Gymnasium in 1943 with concentrations in math and natural science. He matriculated from the University of Copenhagen in fall 1943, having studed English and French literatures and languages with emphasis on philosophy and linguistics. He studied Old Norse, Old and Middle English, Latin, Gothic, French and Sanskrit. During 1944-45, he was trained in underground resistance to the German Occupation, on duty four weeks after May 4, 1945. In fall 1948 Aarsleff was admitted on one-year scholarship to graduate study in English at the University of Minnesota, where the most memorable courses were Robert Penn Warren's on the theory of the novel and the theory of poetry. Aarsleff studied with John W. Clark and Harold B. Allen, taught courses in linguistics and history of the language as assistant to Allen; and studied Hittite with Donald Swanson. During the summers of 1949, 1950, and 1951 he sold ice cream and hot dogs with traveling amusement parks in some states in the Midwest and the West, a very rich and instructive experience. He was an instructor in freshman English at Minnesota from 1942-56 while also working as a busboy in the University Hospitals. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1960. His dissertation on "The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860", published revised under the same title in January of 1967 (with a re-issue in 1983), features innovative introduction on contextual method in the history of scholarship and linguistics, a form of history this book, by virtue of its method, was among the first to initiate. For important information related to the method, see his essay on Koerner's historiography of linguistics in Anthropological Linguistics, March 1973. Dr. Aarsleff joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1956 as an instructor in the Department of English. He became a professor in 1972 and emeritus in 1998. At Princeton, he has taught courses in Early English literature, Chaucer, Old English, Old Norse, history of the language, and the history of linguistic thought, in addition to the entire spectrum of English and largely also American literature as preceptor in many courses. He has published on issues in intellectual history from the 16th century to the 20th, including eight entries in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography and essays on, among others, Locke, Leibniz, Descartes, Herder, Condillac, Humboldt, Taine, Saussure and Joseph Bedier. Some of these essays were later included in a book in 1982. In 1988 came his interpretive introduction to a new translation of Wilhelm von Humboldt's final and chief work on language; in 2001, the Cambridge University Press published his translation with introduction of Condillac's Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. He has also contributed on the philosophy of language to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. In 1984, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and in 1994 he was elected to the APS and to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His chief motive has always been to try to open up fresh ways of looking at things, to question and often to undermine received opinion, and to establish his positions on the grounds of wide and solid knowledge, on well-argued interpretation, and not least, on close attention to context - thus spurning questions - begging claims about climate and opinion as a mode of understanding. For these reasons, his work has often proved controversial, even heretical. But this is a mark of our times. In his years, scholarship has become steadily more compliant, more of the donkey-follow-donkey variety, without circumspection. It is common to see stuff that in notes refers to a slew of "see also" titles that are given without page references, the "see also" category thus easily comprising 2,000 pages or more. Very often, some or all of those titles contain material which, had the author read it, would have forced radical change in the author's argument and in its foundations. He finds good if not cheerful sense in what Max Planck called a "remarkable" fact he once learned in his work, namely that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Julia Annas | | | Institution: | University of Arizona | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Julia Annas is known for her work in ancient ethics and contemporary ethics, especially in the area of virtue ethics, where renewed interest in ancient ethics has stimulated many new developments. She studied the B.A. Literae Humaniores course at Oxford University (Greek and Latin language, literature, history and philosophy) and then received her Ph. D from Harvard University. She returned to Oxford and taught as a Lecturer and then Tutorial Fellow at St Hugh’s College for fifteen years, before becoming Professor (since 1995 Regents Professor) of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. She was the founding editor of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy and has been joint editor for many years of the Oxford Aristotle monographs series. She has been a Senior Fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies, President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association and a Getty Scholar. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, an Honorary Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford and an Honorary Doctor of the University of Uppsala. She has published many books and articles over a wide range of topics in ancient philosophy, with increasing focus on the areas of epistemology and ethics. Her 1993 The Morality of Happiness explored the structure of ancient ethical theories, starting from Aristotle and establishing the general outline of a kind of theory in which virtue and happiness are the central concepts (this is now often called eudaimonist virtue theory). Her 1999 Platonic Ethics Old and New carried the project backwards, looking at ethics in Plato, and forwards, to the more academic ethics of later Platonists. In the last two decades her work has integrated historical study of ancient texts and engagement with the resurgent field of virtue ethics. Her 2011 Intelligent Virtue presents an outline of a contemporary theory in which virtue and happiness are central, which can meet several different philosophical objections and serve as a promising model of ethical theory. She continues to work mainly on contemporary and historical theories of virtue and happiness. Julia Annas was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah | | | Institution: | New York University | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
K. Anthony Appiah has written or edited a score of books: on race theory (where he is recognized as a leading thinker), on philosophy (where he has been called by reviewers "a pro's pro"), and even a series of detective fiction novels. His In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture has been translated into Portuguese and Japanese. It won the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association for the best work published in English on Africa in 1993. Dr. Appiah taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard Universities before moving to Princeton University, where he was Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy. In January 2014 he moved to New York University where he has joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law. He has received many academic honors, published numerous articles and reviews, presented public lectures and papers, holds several editorial positions and is a member of professional associations and committees. In 2008 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Dr. Appiah also served as co-editor of Encarta Africana, the first electronic encyclopedia on Africa and people of African descent. His latest books are Experiments in Ethics (2008) and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010). He was awarded the 2011 National Humanities Medal by President Obama. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Brand Blanshard | | | Year Elected: | 1948 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1892 | | | Death Date: | 11/18/87 | | | | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Sheila E. Blumstein | | | Institution: | Brown University | | | Year Elected: | 1999 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | | |
Sheila E. Blumstein is the Albert D. Mead Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. A 1965 graduate of the University of Rochester, she received a Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard University in 1970, and came to Brown one month later as assistant professor of linguistics. She was promoted to associate professor in 1976, became a full professor in 1981, and was named the Albert D. Mead Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences in 1991. She is also a research associate at the Harold Goodglass Aphasia Research Center. Dr. Blumstein has held a number of administrative positions at Brown including chair of the Department of Linguistics, founding chair of the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, dean of the college, interim provost, and interim president. Dr. Blumstein's research is focused on the processes and mechanisms involved in language speaking and understanding and its neural basis. An internationally recognized expert in neurolinguistics and speech processing, Dr. Blumstein has received numerous academic honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Claude Pepper Investigator Award, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, and election as a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She has served on a wide range of advisory and review committees for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation and has been an officer and member of the Academy of Aphasia and of the Linguistics section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has served on the editorial boards of Cognition and Brain and Language and is currently an advisory editor to Brain and Language. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Victoria Reifler Bricker | | | Institution: | Tulane University | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Victoria R. Bricker received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1968. She joined the faculty of Tulane University in 1969 and became professor emerita of anthropology in 2006. Dr. Bricker's brilliant research has focused on the cultural and linguistic structure of the Maya, ancient and contemporary, with path-breaking studies of three domains: the forms of ritual humor found in modern Mayan cultures (1973); comparative analysis of Mayan insurrections against Spanish rule during the colonial and modern periods (1981); and the grammar of Mayan hieroglyphs (1986). More recently, she has focused her research on the hieroglyphs and iconography found in the Mayan codices - painted bark-cloth books - (1992), and she is now universally recognized as a preeminent world authority in this scholarly field. Dr. Bricker was been the series editor of the Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians between 1977 and 2007. She was an editor for the American Ethnologist (1973-76) and book review editor of the American Anthropologist (1971-73). She is the author of Ritual Humor in Highland Chiapas (1973); The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (1981); A Grammar of Maya Hieroglyphs (1986); Papers on the Madrid Codex (1997; (with Eleuterio Po’ot Yah and Ofelia Dzul de Po’ot) A Dictionary of the Mayan Language as Spoken in Hocaba, Yucatan (1998); (with H. Bricker) "Zodiacal References in the Maya Codices," in The Sky in Mayan Literature (1992); "Color and texture in the Maya language of Yucatan," in Anthropological Linguistics (1999); (with Helga Maria Miram) "An Encounter of Two Worlds: The Book of Chilam Balam of Kaua (2002), and (with Harvey Bricker) Astronomy in the Maya Codices (2011) and Lunar Calendars of the Pre-Columbian Maya (2020); Transformational Journeys: An Ethnologist’s Memoir (2017) and A Historical Grammar of the Maya Language of Yucatan, 1557-2000 (2018). Victoria and Harvey Bricker are the 2011 recipients of the American Philosophical Society's John Frederick Lewis Award for Astronomy in the Maya Codices. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Anthropological Association, serving on its executive board from 1980-83. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Tyler Burge | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Tyler Burge is one of the leading contemporary figures in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and epistemology. His work centers on the essential embeddedness of the individual subject in the social world of which he is a member, and the logical inseparability of ascriptions to an individual of thought, meaning, and knowledge from the objective facts of this social context - even when the individual is not fully aware of those facts. This is not just the evident empirical point that individuals acquire their concepts by social learning. It is a claim about the content of those concepts, and its logical dependence on the world around them and on other speakers of their language. This "anti-individualist" approach casts a new light on the way in which the mind is part of the world. It goes against a venerable tradition extending from Descartes through Frege. As Burge observes, it has some affinities with the tradition of Hegel. His work is also related to that of Hilary Putnam and Donald Davidson. He has explored the implications of these ideas not only for mental content but for meaning, for the objectivity of norms, and for self-knowledge - which is much more puzzling when the boundaries between the self and the world are complicated in this way. These writings are widely cited and very influential. He also has done serious work in the history of philosophy, notably on Frege and Kant. Dr. Burge is presently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. | |
| 8 | Name: | Dr. George Cardona | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | | | | |
A linguist and Indologist, George Cardona is supremely well versed both in the modern Indo-Aryan languages and what is known as "Hindu grammar": the activities which express the ancient Indian concern for the formal properties of the Sanskrit language and their ritual and philosophical significance. During his many stays in India, he has immersed himself both in the (exceedingly difficult) written texts and in the extant oral tradition. His publications include A Gujarati Reference Grammar (1965); Studies in Indian Grammarians, I (1969); Panini, A Survey of Research (1976); Linguistic Analysis and some Indian Traditions (1983); and Panini, His Work and its Traditions (1988). A member of the University of Pennyslvania faculty since 1960, Dr. Cardona currently holds the title of Professor of Linguistics Emeritus. He is a member of the American Oriental Society (president, 1989-90) and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1984). | |
| 9 | Name: | Dr. Nancy D. Cartwright | | | Institution: | University of California, San Diego; Durham University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | | |
Nancy Cartwright is one of the most distinguished philosophers of science currently active in the English-speaking world. There is a unifying theme that runs through the five books and many of the articles she has published. This theme concerns the inevitable nature of the approximations and of the limitations of what we can hope, even in principle, to accomplish in science. These ideas are developed not in terms of grand generalities but by detailed consideration of many examples from a great variety of disciplines, especially economics and physics. Her focus is also often on the significance of the positive results we can expect. She is best known for her extensive publications on the nature of causality and scientific laws. Dr. Cartwright has served as Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science since 1991 and as Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego since 1998. She left LSE and joined the Philosophy Department at Durham University in autumn 2012, to set up a new Centre broadly concerned with "Knowledge, Culture and the Public Good". In addition to working at Durham University, she is Distinguished Professor at University of California, San Diego. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1971. | |
| 10 | Name: | Dr. Harold F. Cherniss | | | Year Elected: | 1949 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 6/18/87 | | | | |
| 11 | Name: | Professor Cora Diamond | | | Institution: | University of Virginia | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1935 | | | | | | |
Cora Diamond is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Philosophy Emerita and Professor of Law Emerita at the University of Virginia. One of the most original and influential recent interpreters of both early (Tractatus-era) and late (Investigations-era) Wittgenstein, her work has inspired a whole new school (the "New Wittgenstein"), but she is also much more than that. Her essays range widely over issues in the philosophy of language, ethics, and literature and they illuminate everything that they touch. She is simultaneously a humanistic and an analytic philosopher, and her work has wide range and great power. | |
| 12 | Name: | Dr. Elizabeth Anderson | | | Institution: | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | | |
Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1987, she earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University, and joined the Philosophy Department at University of Michigan. Professor Anderson designed University of Michigan’s Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program, and was its founding director. She has won fellowships from the ACLS and Guggenheim Foundations, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy, served as President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics (Harvard UP, 1993), The Imperative of Integration (Princeton UP, 2010), Private Government (How Employers Rule our Lives, and Why We Don’t Talk About It) (Princeton UP, 2017) and numerous, widely reprinted articles in journals of philosophy, law, and economics. She specializes in moral and political philosophy, social and feminist epistemology, and the philosophy of the social sciences. She has written extensively on egalitarianism, the interaction of facts and values in social science research, the intersection of democratic theory and social epistemology, and pragmatism. Her current research reconsiders the history of the Protestant work ethic from the 17th century to 21st century neoliberalism. | |
| 13 | Name: | Dr. Murray B. Emeneau | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1952 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | August 29, 2005 | | | | |
| 14 | Name: | Dr. Allan Gibbard | | | Institution: | University of Michigan | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Allan Gibbard is Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (1990), Thinking How to Live (2003), and Reconciling Our Aims (2008), as well as articles on ethical theory, theory of social choice, and topics in decision theory, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. His papers include \"Manipulation of Voting Schemes\" (1973); \"Contingent Identity\" (1975); \"Two Recent Theories of Conditionals\" (1981); \"Meaning and Normativity\" (1994); and \"Rational Credence and the Value of Truth” (2008)\". He earned a B.A. in mathematics from Swarthmore College in 1963 and a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University in 1971. He taught mathematics and physics at Achimota School in Ghana in the U.S. Peace Corps and has taught philosophy at the University of Chicago, the University of Pittsburgh, and, since 1977, at the University of Michigan. He has held research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Member of the American Philosophical Society, a Membre Titulaire of the Institut International de Philosophie, and has been President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association. He is working on a book on the philosopical claim that the concepts of meaning and of mental content are normative concepts. | |
| 15 | 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 | | | | |
| 16 | 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 | | | | |
| 17 | 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. | |
| 18 | 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 | | | | |
| 19 | 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. | |
| 20 | 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). | |
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