| | 21 | 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). | |
| 22 | 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. | |
| 23 | 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 | | | | |
| 24 | 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. | |
| 25 | 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). | |
| 26 | 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. | |
| 27 | 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. | |
| 28 | 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. | |
| 29 | Name: | Dr. Martha Craven Nussbaum | | | Institution: | University of Chicago Law School | | | Year Elected: | 1995 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Martha Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. She received her B.A. from New York University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. She has taught at Harvard, Brown and Oxford Universities. Dr. Nussbaum found in Aristotle and in the thinkers of the Hellenistic period arguments concerning the formation of ethical judgments and the healing of unruly desires that bear importantly on modern dilemmas. She is a public intellectual, offering relevant comments on moral issues, the role of literature and the nature of law.
From 1986-93, Dr. Nussbaum was a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University. She has chaired the Committee on International Cooperation and the Committee on the Status of Women of the American Philosophical Association, and has been a member of the Association's National Board.
Dr. Nussbaum received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award in Non-Fiction in 1990 and the PEN Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the best collection of essays in 1991; Cultivating Humanity won the Ness Book Award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 1998, and the Grawemeyer Award in Education in 2002. Sex and Social Justice won the book award of the North American Society for Social Philosophy in 2000. Some of Martha Nussbaum's most recent works are Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality (2008), Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010), The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (2012), and Monarchy of Fear (2018). In 2009 she was awarded the A.SK prize by Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, an award that pays tribute to social system reformers, Phi Beta Kappa selected Nussbaum for the Sidney Hook Memorial Award in 2012, in 2018 she won the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, and in 2021 she won the Holberg Prize. Martha Nussbaum was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1995. She won the Society's Henry M. Phillips Prize in 2009 in recognition of her intellectual leadership in philosophy, law and religion, including in particular her development and application of a "capabilities approach" to justice in a variety of contexts including women's rights in developing countries and worldwide, of the disabled and the impaired, and animal species. | |
| 30 | Name: | Dr. Keren Rice | | | Institution: | University of Toronto | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1950 | | | | | | |
Keren Rice is a linguist at the University of Toronto. She has made contributions to the areas of theoretical phonology, theoretical morphology, language description, and community-academy linguistics. She focuses on the study of Athabaskan languages of northern Canada. Her book A Grammar of Slave (1989) was awarded the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America for the best book of the year. She currently serves as chair of the Department of Linguistics, and she was the founding director of the Aboriginal Studies program at the University of Toronto. She served as editor of the journal International Journal of American Linguistics for thirteen years, and she has served as president of both the Canadian Linguistic Association and the Linguistic Society of America; she is president-elect of Section Z of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is University Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto, and the recipient of the Killam Prize and the Molson Prize, as well as an Officer of the Order of Canada and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2015 she was both elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and was awarded the Pierre Chauveau Medal of the Royal Society of Canada. | |
| 31 | 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? | |
| 32 | Name: | Dr. Elaine Scarry | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Elaine Scarry is currently Harvard College Professor and the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value in the Department of English at Harvard University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 1974, which she followed with a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania.
Since the publication of The Body in Pain (1985), Elaine Scarry has held a special place in American literary, cultural, and political discourse. That book was widely discussed in many fields, and remains an important point of reference - all the more important since the "torture memos" of the U.S. Department of Justice began to come to light. In fact, the events of 9/11 made Dr. Scarry’s work all the more pertinent, and she has made many timely interventions in ensuing debates. Since moving from the University of Pennsylvania to Harvard, she has pursued work on aesthetics - beauty in relation to truth - and political responsibility (thinking in a situation of emergency) in ways that are unprecedented and impressive. Her work is read in many fields, including law.
She won the Truman Capote Award in 1999 and is the author of several books, Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons (1990), Resisting Representation (1994), Dreaming by the Book (1999), On Beauty and Being Just (1999), Who Defended the Country? A New Democracy Forum on Authoritarian versus Democratic Approaches to National Defense on 9/11 (2003), Rule of Law, Misrule of Men (2010), Thinking in an Emergency (2011), and Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom (2013). Elaine Scarry was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. | |
| 33 | Name: | Dr. John R. Searle | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | | | | |
Intellectual Autobiography of John R. Searle
This will be mainly concerned with my intellectual development. I mention other biographical facts only insofar as they bear on intellectual life. I was born in Denver, Colorado on July 31st, 1932. My mother was a medical doctor, my father an electrical engineer employed by the telephone company. During the war, in 1944, my father transferred to the head office of ATT in New York City.
Intellectually, in the period when I lived in the New York area, the most important thing that happened to me was that in 1945 at the age of 13, I enrolled in the 9th grade of an experimental school run by Columbia University Teachers College, the Horace Mann-Lincoln School (since abolished for financial reasons). It was among the most intense intellectual experiences I have had in my life. The students were selected competitively. The John Dewey theory on which the school was run, that the students decide on what they wanted to study, though hopeless for ordinary schools, worked fine for Horace Mann-Lincoln. The students were both extraordinarily intelligent and intensely motivated. Other private schools had social standing, but we thought we were intellectually the best. (Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech, both public schools, were in intellectual competition, but we had the best chess team.)
After the war in 1946 my father was transferred to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I attended a suburban high school in Shorewood, graduating at the age of 16 in 1949. That Fall I enrolled in the University of Wisconsin. I was lucky in that the university at that time had a very intense program called "Integrated Liberal Studies," which gave me a solid foundation for subsequent intellectual work. Like Horace Mann-Lincoln, ILS had a weak underlying theory, but strong intellectual execution. The theory was that we would in two years receive a unified conception of the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, with a solid understanding of how they developed from the foundations laid by Greek and Roman civilization. The actual execution gave us the best professors in the university, a high quality student body, and an understanding of the relationships among various intellectual endeavors. I do not think I could have received a better first two years of college anywhere in the country at that time.
In the summer of 1951, after my sophomore year in Madison at the age of 18, I had a life-changing experience. Along with some friends, I travelled free to Europe by getting a part time job on a ship crossing the Atlantic chartered by the Council on Student Travel. I spent the summer travelling around Europe, mostly by hitchhiking. I spent the first month in Paris, and then travelled through France, Germany, Austria (through the Soviet Occupation Zone to Vienna), Italy, as far south as Rome, and back up through Italy to the Riviera, and then to Belgium, Holland and England. This was a life-changing experience for me because I became convinced that my education required study in Europe. At that time, Europe in general, and European universities in particular had an intellectual prestige and élan that seemed lacking in the United States and in American universities. Rightly or wrongly, I thought that the great European universities were better than any American universities, and this view was widely held at the time. When I got back to Madison, I tried to find funding that would take me to Europe to complete my undergraduate studies, but discovered that as a 19 year old junior, I was ineligible to apply for sources of funding such as the Fulbright Scholarship. The only thing I was eligible for was the Rhodes Scholarship, and I was told that at my age I was unlikely to get it. I may have been helped by the fact that I was student body president, raced on the ski team, and had a straight A average. In any case, I won a Rhodes, and went to Oxford. I again got a job working my way to Europe, and travelled around Europe in the summer before matriculating in Oxford as an undergraduate in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in October of 1952.
My first year in Oxford was something of a disappointment and it seemed to me that the intellectual level was no better than the University of Wisconsin, and perhaps not as good. But in my second and third year, all of that changed, and I fell in with a group of fellow undergraduates who were passionately interested in philosophy. I was especially influenced by Frank Cioffi, Nigel Lawson, and Robin Farquharson. Oxford was at that time the world leader in Philosophy and many of the teachers were first rate. I attended lectures and was taught by Peter Strawson, J.L. Austin, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Michael Dummett, David Pears, Elizabeth Anscombe and Bernard Williams among others. The chief influences on me were Austin and Strawson. There is a certain irony in my relation to Austin, because when I first went to Austin's lectures on speech acts, I found them boring. Later I began to appreciate his qualities and we discussed philosophical arguments frequently. Once we argued so long after class that we were locked up in the building - until the janitors rescued us. The fact that I initially found his work boring is ironic because my first book, Speech Acts (1969), and much of second book, Expression and Meaning (1979), were directed to problems that were initiated by Austin, and I thought of myself, as many other people did, as carrying on his work. Another life-changing experience was that in my final years as an undergraduate, I was, only for a few weeks, tutored by Peter Strawson. More than anybody else, he taught me how to do philosophy.
I completed my degree in Oxford in 1955, and accepted a senior scholarship at St. Anthony's College, which enabled me to continue graduate studies in Oxford. In 1956, I became a Research Lecturer at Christ Church, and I stayed on for three more years in Oxford as Research Lecturer and Tutorial Lecturer. In that time I finished my D.Phil. thesis. On Christmas Eve in 1958, I married Dagmar Carboch, and we have now been married nearly 52 years. We have two grown sons, Thomas and Mark, and two granddaughters, Grace and Bianca. My Oxford thesis was about problems in the philosophy of language, specifically connected with the notions of sense and reference. My work on speech acts eventually grew out of early work on reference, and speech acts was the subject of my first book, published in 1969.
In the Fall of 1959, I accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley. In Berkeley I continued to work primarily in the philosophy of language, especially a theory of speech acts. I have published two books on that subject, Speech Acts and Expression and Meaning, as well as a number of articles.
The speech act approach to language inspired by Austin, but also heavily influenced by Wittgenstein, Strawson and Grice, is to think of speaking a language as a form of intentional human activity. Speaking is acting. On this approach, you think not of words as referring to objects, making statements, etc., but rather you think of speakers as using words to refer to objects, and intentionally making statements, etc. To think of speaking language as a form of human activity recasts a rather large number of traditional philosophical disputes, and I continue to believe that it is the correct approach to the philosophy of language.
In the Fall of 1964, I had nearly completed Speech Acts, but my researches were interrupted by my participation and active involvement in the Free Speech Movement, a protest movement directed against the policies of the then university administration, which on one occasion included preventing me, a local professor, from giving a special lecture on campus. This activity, though it seemed definitely a sideline for me initially, occupied the center of my attention for the next three years, and really continuing on through most of the 60's. After the success of the FSM and the failure of the administration, I served two years in the new university administration as Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Student Affairs. I also spent some time in Washington DC as a member of the Heard Commission, advising the national administration on the problems of the universities. The main intellectual result for me of this whole experience of student unrest was that in 1971 I published "The Campus War," a book about the university upheavals of the period.
In my work on the philosophy of language, I had used free use of "intentionalistic" notions such as "belief", "desire", and "intention", and I felt like this was borrowing money from the bank and I would one day have to pay it back by writing a book about intentionality. I began work on that in the middle 70's, but it was not until the 1980's that it was finally published, Intentionality (1983). It was the hardest book I ever wrote, and there is a sense in which it is a foundation for all of my other work, both before and afterward. In philosophy, by the way, one typically constructs the foundations of the structure after the structure is built, so it is not surprising that in 1983 I published the foundation of work that I had done in the late 60's. The claims that I would lay for my account of intentionality in that book are two: first, it is a comprehensive account of the functioning of intentional states that includes not just beliefs and desires, but perceptions, intentional actions, memories, and embeds them in a holistic account of how our mental life is structured not in atomistic units but in networks of mental phenomena that I call the "Network," and against a background of human capacitites and dispositions that I call the "Background." The second claim that I would make is that my account of intentionality is completely naturalistic in that intentionality, with all of its intrinsic irreducibly first-person mode of existence, is seen as a natural biological phenomena, as much a part of biology as digestion or photosynthesis.
In the course of writing Intentionality I read a lot of the material in the contemporary philosophy of mind, and taught courses in the subject. I discovered to my horror that views that I regarded as false to the point of preposterousness - such as behaviorism, or various forms of materialism such as the computational theory of the mind, as well as old-fashioned dualism - were still quite common, and indeed, widely accepted by otherwise competent professionals in the philosophy of mind. So I wrote some more critical, indeed polemical, works attacking these views. Among the most famous of these was an article I published in 1983, presenting what was called "The Chinese Room Argument," refuting the idea that the mind is just a computer program implemented in the brain ("Minds, Brains, and Programs," The Behavioral Brain Sciences). I also published a book length discussion of the nature of mind and the study of the mind (The Rediscovery of the Mind, 1992). I continued to publish fairly extensively on problems of the mind, and brought out my Reith Lectures, "Mind, Brains, and Science," in 1984. In this middle period, if I may so describe it, I was not working primarily on problems in the philosophy of language, but on problems in the philosophy of mind, and I was very active in both the foundation of, and the continuous activity of, the Berkeley Cognitive Science Group. My work in the philosophy of mind differs from mainstream philosophy in its combination of an anti-reductionist and yet naturalistic bent. I think that intentionality and consciousness are not reducible to behavior, computer programs, or any rest of the materialist candidates. But at the same time, they are a part of nature, and I have baptized my approach to these questions as "biological naturalism." Eventually I felt that I had said most of what I had to say about the pure philosophical aspects of cognition, but the ground had now been prepared for further neurobiological studies. Specifically, in 1995, I published an article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, "Counsciousness," where I described what I thought a proper scientific study of consciousness should be like.
In the early 90's, I began to work on and explore problems in the nature of social ontology. There is a question that had always bothered me, and that is, How is it that there can be an objective reality of money, property, government, and marriage, when that reality only exists because we think it exists? It is an objective fact that this is a twenty dollar bill, and yet such facts exist not on the paper as such, but in the minds of the people who produce and use the bills. How does that work? It is an odd weakness in intellectual history that this problem of social ontology was not adequately solved by the great founders of sociology, but the reason for their failure is clear. They did not have an adequate theory of language. The answer I give to this question is essentially an application of my theory of speech acts. All of objective institutional reality including not just money, property, government, and marriage, but cocktail parties, summer vacations, universities, and certified public accountants are created by the use of language. In general, the features that we think of as characteristic of the institutional parts of human civilization, are created in their initial existence and maintained in existence by speech acts that have a certain specific logical form.
The basic idea is to connect the fundamental concepts that underlie human civilization. Humans have an ability to assign functions that people and objects can perform, where the function is performed not in virtue of the physical structure, but in terms of the assignment of a certain status, and the function is performed in virtue of that status. Thus, knives have a function performed in virtue of their physical structure, but twenty dollar bills have a function performed in virtue of an assigned status. I call these "status functions." All specifically institutional facts are status functions, and status functions are important because they embody a certain class of powers, what I call "deontic powers" - rights, duties, obligations, etc. - and these deontic powers are the glue that holds human civilization together because they create desire independent reasons for action. I have expounded and explained these ideas in considerable length in two books, The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World (2010).
After I had been doing philosophy professionally for decades, it eventually dawned on me that I was really answering a single question. It is this: Granted that the world we inhabit is entirely composed of mindless, meaningless, physical particles, how can there be a meaningful human reality that includes consciousness, intentionality, free will, rationality, language, society, ethics, aesthetics, economics, and politics? That is the question I have been addressing in all of these various books and articles. So the question of language is how do we get from the physics - from the acoustic blasts or the marks on paper - the the meaningful speech act? The question for the mind is how is it possible for "physical" structures in the brain, such as neurons with their synapses, to cause and sustain a mental reality? How is it possible in a world of physical particles for there to be an objective reality of money, property, and other social institutions? Most of my subsequent ideas were already contained in an implicit form in Speech Acts. In a sense then, all of my books have been part of one large book, and that work continues.
Such, in a very brief and compact form, is a summary of my intellectual trajectory. As far as the bare curriculum vitae aspects of my life are concerned, I have now spent 51 years as a fulltime faculty member in Berkeley. As there is no longer compulsory retirement, I have not been forced to retire, and have chosen not to do so. I have been a Visiting Professor in a large number of universities, including the University of Michigan, the University of Colorado and Rutgers University. In Europe and South America, I have been a visiting faculty member in Oxford, for one year, and for shorter periods in Berlin, Paris, Frankfurt, Aarhus, Graz, Venice, Florence, Rome Campinas, and Palermo. I have lectured extensively in China, Japan and South Korea and am an honorary Visiting Professor at universities in Beijing and Shanghai. I have published twenty books, over two hundred articles and the works have been translated into twenty three languages. | |
| 34 | Name: | Dr. Michael Silverstein | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2008 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | Death Date: | July 17, 2020 | | | | | | |
Michael Silverstein (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1972) was Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Psychology, and was in the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, at the University of Chicago. He studied language structure and its functional contextualization, language history and prehistory, the anthropology of language use, sociolinguistics, semiotics, language and cognition (and their development), and history of linguistic and ethnographic studies. His fieldwork in northwestern North America and northwestern Australia has been the basis of various descriptive, theoretical and generalizing contributions. He was also investigating language use and textuality as sites of contestation and transformation of cultural value in contemporary American society, reconceptualizing sociocultural and rhetorical practices in light of the semiotic anthropology of communication. Michael Silverstein was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. | |
| 35 | Name: | Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University. A founder of postcolonialism, an important subdiscipline in literary and cultural studies, she translated Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, which introduced Derrida to the English speaking world. Her early essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" has had world-wide influence, as have her other books and essays. She has been visiting professor, or held fellowships, or has given lectures all over the world. Her books and essays have been translated into many languages. A distinguished scholar in an adjacent field has said of Professor Spivak that "her influence on Third World feminism, Continental feminist theory, Marxist theory, subaltern studies and the philosophy of alterity is unparalleled by any living scholar; she has changed the academic terrain of each of these fields by her acute and brilliant contributions; her critical interrogation of the political status quo in its global dimensions has reached tens of thousands of activists and scholars." She was awarded the 2012 Kyoto Prize of the Inamori Foundation for Arts and Philosophy (Thought and Ethics), the 2013 Padma Bhushan from the Government of India, and the 2017 Lifetime Scholarly Achievement from the Modern Language Association of America. | |
| 36 | Name: | Dr. Gregory Vlastos | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1989 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1907 | | | Death Date: | 10/12/91 | | | | |
| 37 | Name: | Dr. Calvert Watkins | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles & Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1975 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1933 | | | Death Date: | March 20, 2013 | | | | | | |
Calvert Watkins was Victor S. Thomas Professor of Linguistics and the Classics, Emeritus at Harvard University and Professor-in-Residence, Department of Classics and Program in Indo-European Studies, at the University of California, Los Angeles at the time of his death on March 20, 2013 at the age of 80. He was interested in the linguistics and the poetics of all the earlier Indo-European languges and societies, particularly Greek, Latin and Italic, Celtic (especially Early Irish), Anatolian (especially Hittite and Luvian), Vedic Indic, and Old Iranian; historical linguistic theory and method; and Indo-European genetic comparative literature. His last book, which treats all these interests, is How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (1995), which was awarded the Goodwin Prize in 1998. Dr. Watkins's other works include Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb I. The Sigmatic Aorist (1962); The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (1985, revised 2000); and the "Historical linguistics and culture history," "Indo-European languages," and "Stylistic reconstruction" entries in the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. He also served as editor of Studies in Memory of Warren Cowgill (1987) and has written over 150 articles and reviews, 53 of which are reprinted in the two volumes of his Selected Writings, edited by Lisi Oliver (1994), ranging from "Indo-European metrics and Archaic Irish verse" to "The language of the Trojans". Dr. Watkins served as president of the Linguistic Society of America (1988) and as chair of Harvard University's Department of Linguistics for eleven years from 1985-91. He was an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy (1968), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1973) and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (1987) and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. | |
| 38 | Name: | Dr. Susan Wolf | | | Institution: | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Susan Wolf is the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her B.A. in math and philosophy from Yale University in 1974 and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1978. She taught at Harvard University, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University before joining the University of North Carolina faculty in 2002. She has held visiting fellowships at the Australian National University and the University College, Oxford, as well as the Visiting Belle van Zuylen Chair at the University of Utrecht. She has also held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women and the Guggenheim Foundation. Recently she received the Mellon Foundation's award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. Dr. Wolf is the author of Freedom Within Reason (1990), a book on free will and moral responsibility, and has written numerous articles on ethics and the philosophy of mind. These include Morality and Partiality, Two Levels of Pluralism, Self-Interest and Interest in Selves, Moral Saints, and Asymmetrical Freedom. Her current research focuses on the relations among happiness, morality, and meaningfulness in life. | |
| |