Catherine Z. Elgin | |
|---|---|
 Elgin in 2017 | |
| Born | 1948 |
| Alma mater | Brandeis University |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
Main interests | epistemology and the philosophies of art and science |
Catherine Z. Elgin (born 1948) is a philosopher working in epistemology and the philosophies of art and science. [1] She is currently a professor of philosophy of education at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University.
She holds a Ph.D. from Brandeis University where she studied with Nelson Goodman. She has held tenure-track and visiting positions at many universities, including Michigan State University, Vassar College, Princeton University, and MIT. [2] In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. [3]
Elgin's work has considered such questions as "what makes something cognitively valuable?" As an epistemologist, she considers the pursuit of understanding to be of higher value than the pursuit of knowledge. [1]
In Considered Judgment, Elgin argues for "a reconception that takes reflective equilibrium as the standard of rational acceptability." [4]
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality. In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences.
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He served as the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978.
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.
Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and continues today. Analytic philosophy is often contrasted with continental philosophy, coined as a catch-all term for other methods, prominent in Europe.
Reflective equilibrium is a state of balance or coherence among a set of beliefs arrived at by a process of deliberative mutual adjustment among general principles and particular judgements. Although he did not use the term, philosopher Nelson Goodman introduced the method of reflective equilibrium as an approach to justifying the principles of inductive logic. The term reflective equilibrium was coined by John Rawls and popularized in his A Theory of Justice as a method for arriving at the content of the principles of justice.
Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American analytic philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has taught since 1984. She has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989. She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department, Moscow State University. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Educated at the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and Somerville College, Oxford, she taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is married to the philosopher Paul Churchland. Larissa MacFarquhar, writing for The New Yorker, observed of the philosophical couple that: "Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed, in journals and books, as one person."
The new riddle of induction was presented by Nelson Goodman in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast as a successor to Hume's original problem. It presents the logical predicates grue and bleen which are unusual due to their time-dependence. Many have tried to solve the new riddle on those terms, but Hilary Putnam and others have argued such time-dependency depends on the language adopted, and in some languages it is equally true for natural-sounding predicates such as "green". For Goodman they illustrate the problem of projectible predicates and ultimately, which empirical generalizations are law-like and which are not. Goodman's construction and use of grue and bleen illustrates how philosophers use simple examples in conceptual analysis.
Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism, and aesthetics.
Gilbert Harman was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller co-directed the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory. Harman taught or co-taught courses in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, and Linguistics.
Philip Stuart Kitcher is a British philosopher who is John Dewey Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University. He specialises in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of literature, and more recently pragmatism.
Allegra Goodman is an American writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Goodman wrote and illustrated her first novel at the age of seven.
Irrealism is a philosophical position first advanced by Nelson Goodman in "Ways of Worldmaking", encompassing epistemology, metaphysics, and aesthetics.
Elijah "Lije" Millgram is an American philosopher. He is E. E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His research specialties include practical reason and moral philosophy.
Sissela Bok is a Swedish-born American philosopher and ethicist, the daughter of two Nobel Prize winners: Gunnar Myrdal who won the Economics prize with Friedrich Hayek in 1974, and Alva Myrdal who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. She is considered one of the premier American women moral philosophers of the latter part of the 20th century.
Alfred I. Tauber is an American philosopher and historian of science, who, from 1993 to 2010, served as director of the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University.
Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1955) is a book by Nelson Goodman in which he explores some problems regarding scientific law and counterfactual conditionals and presents his New Riddle of Induction. Hilary Putnam described the book as "one of the few books that every serious student of philosophy in our time has to have read." According to Jerry Fodor, "it changed, probably permanently, the way we think about the problem of induction, and hence about a constellation of related problems like learning and the nature of rational decision." Noam Chomsky and Hilary Putnam attended some of the lectures on which the book is based as undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, leading to a lifelong debate between the two over the question of whether the problems presented in the book imply that there must be an innate ordering of hypotheses.
Israel Scheffler was an American philosopher of science and of education.
Barbara Herman is the Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Philosophy. A well-known interpreter of Kant's ethics, Herman works on moral philosophy, the history of ethics, and social and political philosophy. Among her many honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985-1986) and election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1995).
Catherine Warren Wilson is a British/American/Canadian philosopher. She was formerly Anniversary Professor at the University of York and from 2009 to 2012 the Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. She is known for her interdisciplinary studies of visuality, moral psychology and aesthetics, and especially early microscopy and Epicurean atomism and materialism.
Margaret Schabas is a Canadian philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia notable for her work in the history and philosophy of science, particularly the science of economics. Schabas has also published numerous articles and book chapters on the British empiricists, David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill.
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