Emeritus Faculty

Leonard Linsky

Professor Linsky received a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He has held teaching positions at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Tel Aviv University (Tel Aviv) and the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association, and a recipient of the medal of the Université de Liège (Belgium). He served as chair of the Department at the University of Chicago. Professor Linsky's teaching and research falls into two areas; the philosophy of language, and the history of early Analytic Philosophy. He has published several dozen articles and five books: Semantics and the Philosophy of Language(edited with an Introduction, this book has been translated into Italian and has been in print continuously for fifty years since its publication), Reference and Modality (edited with an Introduction, this book has been translated into Italian), Referring (translated into French), Oblique Contexts, Names and Descriptions(translated into Spanish). His most recent publications are on the early philosophy of Bertrand Russell ("The Unity of the Proposition", and "Russell's 'no-classes' Theory of Classes".) He continues, in retirement, to teach classes and to direct workshops on Wittgenstein.

Ian Mueller

Professor Mueller served as Chair of the Department and as Director of Graduate Studies and of Undergraduate Studies. He was also Chair of the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science and a member of the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World. He is a member of the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences and on the editorial boards of Apeiron and Sciences et Techniques en Perspective. He has held research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (twice), the Center for Hellenic Studies, the Fondation Les Treilles (Salernes, France), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Center for Scientific Research (Paris, France), the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, and Christ's College, Cambridge. His main research interests are in ancient Greek philosophy of science and the reception of Aristotle in later antiquity. He is the author or editor of six books and has published more than seventy scholarly articles and reviews.

Howard Stein

Professor Stein, born 1929, received a B.A. degree from Columbia University in 1947, a Ph. D. from The University of Chicago (Department of Philosophy) in 1958, and an M. S. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (Department of Mathematics) in 1959. His work in philosophy has centered in the philosophy of physics, and to some extent that of mathematics, with a strong emphasis upon the history of physics and mathematics, and the history of philosophy itself as it has been concerned with those disciplines, in periods ranging from antiquity ("Comments on 'The Thesis of Parmenides'" [1969]); "Eudoxos and Dedekind: On the Ancient Greek Theory of Ratios and its Relation to Modern Mathematics" [1995]) through the present (e.g.: "A Problem in Hilbert Space Theory Arising from the Quantum Theory of Measurement" [1979]; "On the Present State of the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics" [1982]; "On Relativity Theory and Openness of the Future" [1991]; "On Quantum Non-locality, Special Relativity, and Counterfactual Reasoning" [forthcoming]), with considerable attention to the seventeenth century (e.g.: "Newtonian Space-Time" [1967]; "On Locke, 'the Great Huygenius, and the incomparable Mr. Newton'" [1990]; "On Philosophy and Natural Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century" [1993]; "Newton's Metaphysics" [2002]). He is currently preparing a number of papers for publication (see list of pending items in his curriculum vitæ), and preparing also the first volume, dedicated to papers that center on the work of Isaac Newton, of a projected collected edition of his articles.

William Tait

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Chicago. Received a B.A. at Lehigh University in 1952 and a Ph.D. at Yale University (Philosophy) in 1958. He has taught at Stanford (1958-1964), University of Illinois-Chicago (1065-1971), Aarhus University (1971-72), University of Chicago (1972-1996). Main areas of research are logic and the philosophy of mathematics and its history.