University of Pittsburgh · School
of Arts and Sciences
Department of
History and Philosophy of Science
Secondary Faculty
Nuel Belnap
Logic, Philosophical Logic, Metaphysics
Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Alan Ross Anderson Distinguished Professor of Philosophy (PhD, Yale, 1960). Before joining the faculty at Pitt in 1963, he taught at Yale. He is co-author (with Thomas B. Steel) of The Logic of Questions and Answers (Yale, 1976), of Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity (volume 1, with Alan Ross Anderson, 1976; volume 2, with Alan Ross Anderson and J. Michael Dunn, 1992), and (with Anil Gupta) of The Revision Theory of Truth (MIT, 1993), and co-author (with Michael Perloff and Ming Xu) of Facing the Future: Agents and Choices in Our Indeterminist World (Oxford, 2001). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an NEH Fellow, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His present interests lie principally in philosophical logic, with other interests in metaphysics, the philosophy of the social sciences, and computer science.
Gordon Belot
Philosophy of Physics
Philosophy of Science
Associate Professor (Ph.D., Pittsburgh, 1996). Before joining the faculty at Pitt in 2004, he taught at Princeton and NYU. He has held a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and a fellowship from the National Science Foundation. His primary interests are in philosophy of physics and philosophy of science. Several of his recent papers are concerned with the interpretative, methodological, and metaphysical implications of symmetry principles.
Anil Gupta
Logic, Philosophy of Language
Metaphysics, Epistemology
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, professor of history and philosophy of science, and a fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science (PhD, Pittsburgh, 1977). Before joining the department in 2001, he taught at Indiana, Illinois at Chicago, and McGill. He is the author of The Logic of Common Nouns (Yale, 1980) and co-author (with Nuel Belnap) of The Revision Theory of Truth (MIT, 1993). He was fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, in 1998-99, and he has twice been awarded NEH fellowships for university teachers. His main interests lie in logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. Topics that are of special interest to him include definitions, truth, meaning, and perception.
Kenneth Manders
History & Philosophy of Mathematics
Philosophy of Science
Associate Professor of Philosophy (PhD, UC Berkeley, 1974). He currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies. He was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and NEH fellow, and has held a NATO postdoctoral fellowship in science (at Utrecht), a NSF mathematical sciences postdoctoral fellowship (at Yale), and a Howard Foundation Fellowship. His research interests lie in the philosophy, history, and foundations of mathematics; and in general questions on relations between intelligibility, content, and representational or conceptual casting. He is currently working on a book on geometrical representation, centering on Descartes. He has published a number of articles on philosophy of mathematics, history of mathematics, model theory, philosophy of science, measurement theory, and the theory of computational complexity.
Gerald J. Massey
Logic, Philosophy of Science
Philosophy of Language, History of Philosophy
Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy, former Chairman of the Department of Philosophy (1970-77), former member of the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association (1975-80), and former Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science (1988-97)(PhD, Princeton, 1964). Before joining the Philosophy Department in 1970, he was Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State, where he had taught since 1963. He has been Managing Editor of the journal Philosophy of Science (1963-69), Secretary-Treasurer of the Philosophy of Science Association (1964-70), and has held visiting appointments at the University of Michigan (1967) and Hamilton College (1982). In 1997 he was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse) by the President of Germany, Dr. Roman Herzog, for his contributions to German-American philosophical cooperation. His principal interests are zoological philosophy, history of philosophy, logic, philosophy & methodology of science, and philosophy of language.
Thomas Ricketts
History of Analytic Philosophy
Tom Ricketts joined the Philosophy Department in Fall 2005 as Professor. He previously held faculty appointments at Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. His research interests focus on the development of Analytic Philosophy, especially Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Quine.
Nicholas Rescher
Metaphysics, Epistemology
Pragmatism, Phil of Science
History of Philosophy, Ethics
University Professor of Philosophy (PhD, Princeton, 1951). He came to the University in 1961, has served as chairman of the philosophy department, and is vice chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science. Born in Germany in 1928, he is the author of more than 90 books on a wide variety of philosophical subjects, and has pioneered in the revival and refurbishing of the idealistic tradition in epistemology and metaphysics in the light of ideas drawn from American pragmatism. Having served as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (1989-90) and of the Leibniz Society of North America, he is currently president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association and is president-elect for 2004-5 of the Metaphysical Society of America. From 1969 to 1993 he edited the American Philosophical Quarterly . Honorary degrees have been awarded to Professor Rescher by Loyola University of Chicago, Lehigh University, the Argentine National University of Cordoba, and the University of Konstanz, as well as his alma mater, Queens College of the City University of New York and the FernUniversität Hagen in his native city. In 1983 he received an Alexander von Humboldt Prize awarded under the auspices of the German Federal Republic for distinguished scholarship in the humanities.
Laura Ruetsche
Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Physics
Plato
Associate Professor of Philosophy (PhD, Pittsburgh, 1995). Before returning to the University of Pittsburgh in 1996, she taught at Middlebury College in Vermont. She has also held visiting appointments at Cornell and Rutgers. Her interests include the foundations of physics, the epistemology of scientific practice, and the work of Plato.
Mark Wilson
History & Philosophy of Science and Mathematics
Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language
Professor of Philosophy (Ph.D, Harvard, 1976). Before coming to Pittsburgh, he taught at the University of California-San Diego, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and Ohio State. His main research investigates the manner in which physical and mathematical concerns often become entangled with issues characteristic of metaphysics and philosophy of language; he is currently writing a book on the subject. He is also interested in the historical dimensions of this interchange; in this vein, he has written on Descartes, Frege, Duhem, and Wittgenstein. He has also published a number of recordings of traditional folk musicians.
Professor Emeritus
Bernard R. Goldstein
History of Mathematics and Astronomy
Emeritus University Professor (Religious Studies, History). He is author of The Arabic Version of Ptolemy's Planetary Hypotheses (1971), The Astronomical Tables of Levi Ben Gerson (1974), and Theory and Observation in Ancient and Medieval Astronomy (1985). Exact sciences in antiquity and middle ages, mathematics and astronomy in Hebrew and Arabic, Kepler's astronomy.
Professor Emeritus
Fritz Ringer
The History of Scientific Societies
Max Weber
Andrew Mellon Professor of History Emeritus. He is the author of The Decline of the German Mandarins; Education and Society in Modern Europe; Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890-1920; and numerous papers and articles. He served as a member of the editorial boards of The Journal of Modern History and The History of Education Quarterly, and Central European History. He specializes in modern French and German intellectual history and the history and philosophy of the cultural and social studies. He is presently working on a study of Max a study of Max Weber.