Frederic Schick

(1929-2022)

Frederic Schick earned his PhD at Columbia, and taught at Rutgers for over fifty years. His areas of research were decision theory, philosophy of action, and philosophy of economics. [Further information:  ...

Laurent Stern

(d. 2021)

Laurent Stern was a member of the Rutgers faculty for more than 30 years. Professor Stern began at Rutgers College, and helped unify the scattered departments of the various colleges into the unified department we have today. His scholarship on

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Ginny Mayer

(d. 2021)

Ginny Mayer was a staff member at Rutgers from 1986 until her retirement at 1998, serving as graduate program administrator. She was also dedicated to volunteer work and was very involved in several organizations. A native Spanish speaker, she

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Richard Garner

(1936-2020)

Richard Garner was an adjunct professor at Rutgers from 2000-2005; before then he had been a member of the Ohio State philosophy department, from 1963-1995. His areas of research were the philosophy of language, Asian philosophy, and value

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Loretta Mandel

(1929-2018)

Loretta Mandel worked as a staff member in the philosophy department for over 30 years, on the Livingston and Douglass campuses, serving as the department administrator. She received her BA from Rutgers while working here. After retiring from

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Marco Dees

(1984-2018)

Marco Dees was a graduate student in our department, receiving his Ph.D. in 2015. He wrote a dissertation on the metaphysics of quantities, space, and time, co-advised by Dean Zimmerman and Jonathan Schaffer. He had begun to publish papers based on

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Peter Kivy

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Aesthetics, Early Modern Philosophy

(1934-2017)

Peter Kivy taught at Rutgers from 1967 until his retirement in 2015. Kivy was a giant in the field of aesthetics, and in philosophy of music in particular. He published extensively and won many prizes and awards, including a Guggenheim

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Jerry Fodor

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Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Language, and Philosophy of Science

(1935-2017)

Jerry Fodor's arrival at Rutgers in 1987 catapulted our department to the top ranks, and his presence then helped attract many other outstanding philosophers and cognitive scientists to Rutgers. With his sharp sense of humor, his provocative,

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Kent Johnson

(1970-2017)

Kent Johnson received a certificate in cognitive science and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Rutgers in 2001, and then taught at the Logic and Philosophy of Science Department at UC-Irvine until his death. His post allowed him to pursue interests

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Renee Weber

(1929-2017)

Renee Weber spent her entire career at Rutgers, from 1964-1996. She was the first woman to be tenured in the Rutgers College department (1971), and was awarded the college’s Outstanding Teacher award in 1979. She had deep interests in

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Mark Colby

(1955-2014)

Mark Colby was a part time lecturer in our department for many years. He had two PhDs (from Columbia and Oxford), and his courses and his dedication to his students at Rutgers were legendary.


[Further information: ...

Brian Loar

(1939-2014)

Brian Loar taught at Rutgers from 1994 until his retirement in 2007. Loar wrote about the nature of meaning and of consciousness. His major contributions in the philosophy of mind include his groundbreaking solution to the mind-body problem in

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Bruce Wilshire

(1932-2013)

Bruce Wilshire was a professor in the department from 1969-2009. Beginning as a specialist in William James, he became known for his work on philosophy and theater, his criticisms of analytic philosophy, and his interest in Native American

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Fadlou Shehadi

(d. 2012)

Fadlou Shehadi taught at Rutgers from 1953 until his retirement in 1994. He chaired the Philosophy Department at Douglass College for a total of nine years, and twice directed the Rutgers Study Abroad program in France. He is best known, in

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Richard Henson

(1925-2007)

Richard Henson was a professor at Rutgers from 1969-1994. A Marine in World War II, in the post war Henson found himself pursuing a master’s degree in philosophy at Swarthmore and then he went on to earn a doctorate at Yale. His focus was ethics,

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John Yolton

(1921-2005)

John Yolton joined Rutgers in 1978 as Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Rutgers College. After stepping down as Dean in 1985, he continued as professor until his retirement in 1992. Yolton was a scholar of the early modern period, especially

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Arthur F. Smullyan

(d. 1998)

Arthur Smullyan taught at Rutgers from 1968 until his retirement in 1982. He was chair from 1968 to 1976, a period in which the foundation was laid for the department's subsequent dramatic expansion. Smullyan primarily worked in formal epistemology

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Albert Blumberg

(1906-1997)

Albert Blumberg taught at Rutgers from 1965 to 1977. During that time he helped plan and organize Livingston College, built the Livingston Philosophy Department, serving as its chair from 1969 until 1975, and was repeatedly elected president of

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Robert Weingard

(d. 1996)

Robert Weingard was a professor at Rutgers from 1970 until his sudden death at the age of fifty-four in 1996. His research initially dealt with problems of space and time, such as time travel and philosophical aspects of black holes. The philosophy

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Edward Bloustein

(d. 1989)

Edward Bloustein was president of Rutgers University from 1971 until his untimely death in 1989 at the age of 64. Without Bloustein as president, there is no philosophy department, at least not one that became great. As described in the

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Joseph Neyer

(1913-1989)

Joseph Neyer was a long-serving professor at Rutgers (from 1947-1989). He was chair from 1953 to 1965, a key period in the department’s history as Rutgers was transitioning from its private college roots to officially becoming the State

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Mason W. Gross

(d. 1977)

Mason W. Gross is best known as the 16th president of Rutgers, from 1959 to 1971. Before that, he was appointed Rutgers’ first provost in 1949. But in his heart he was a philosopher and took pride in serving as a member of the Rutgers philosophy

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Thanks to Robert McGarvey for help with many of these.