| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Tyler Burge | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | 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. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Judith Butler | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | 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: | Professor Cora Diamond | | | Institution: | University of Virginia | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | 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. | |
| 4 | Name: | Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | 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. | |
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