Richard Boyd | |
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![]() Richard Boyd | |
Born | Richard Newell Boyd May 19, 1942 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
Died | February 20, 2021 Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. | (aged 78)
Education | MIT |
Spouse | Barbara Koslowski |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Analytic Scientific realism Moral realism philosophical naturalism[1] |
Thesis | A Recursion-Theoretic Characterization of the Ramified Analytical Hierarchy (1970) |
Doctoral advisor | Richard Cartwright[2] |
Doctoral students | Paul Horwich, J. D. Trout |
Main interests | Philosophy of science |
Notable ideas | Causal theory of reference-fixing for theoretical terms,[3] definition of biological natural kinds[4][1] |
Richard Newell Boyd (May 19, 1942 – February 20, 2021)[5][6] was an American philosopher, who spent most of his career teaching philosophy at Cornell University where he was Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters Emeritus. He specialized in epistemology, the philosophy of science, language, and mind.[7]
Professor Boyd specializes in philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. He is also interested in ethics, in social and political philosophy, especially Marxism, and in the philosophy of biology. He came to the Sage School faculty in 1972, after teaching at Harvard, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley.