| | 1 | 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). | |
| 2 | 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. | |
| 3 | 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. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Thomas M. Scanlon | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2018 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Thomas M. Scanlon, Jr., generally known as Tim Scanlon, is Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, emeritus, at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from Princeton in 1962, and after a year at Oxford did his graduate work at Harvard, receiving his PhD in philosophy in 1968. He taught at Princeton from 1966 until moving to Harvard in 1984. Scanlon has written widely on topics in moral and political philosophy, including practical reason, the nature of moral right and wrong, value, well being, responsibility and blame, the obligation to keep a promise, freedom of expression, tolerance, and the basis of equality. He is best know for his defense of a contractualist theory of right and wrong, for an approach to morality and practical reasoning that takes the idea of a reason as the basic notion; and for his defense of the view that claims about reasons for action are capable of truth and falsity. In addition to many articles, he has written five books: What We Owe to Each Other; The Difficulty of Tolerance; Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame; Being Realistic about Reasons; and, most recently, Why Does Inequality Matter? | |
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