Philip Kitcher

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Philip Stuart Kitcher (born 1947) is a British philosophy professor who specializes in the philosophy of science.

Born in London, Kitcher spent his early life in Eastbourne, East Sussex, on the South Coast of the United Kingdom. He earned his B.A. in Mathematics/History and Philosophy of Science from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1969, and his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Princeton University in 1974.

Kitcher is best known for his work examining bioethics, creationism and sociobiology. His works attempt to connect the questions raised in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mathematics with the central philosophical issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. He has also published papers on John Stuart Mill, Kant and other figures in the history of philosophy. Lately he has become interested in John Dewey.

Kitcher is currently the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. As chair of Columbia's Contemporary Civilization program (part of its undergraduate Core Curriculum), he also holds the James R. Barker Professorship of Contemporary Civilization. He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association. His wife, Patricia Kitcher, is a well known Kant scholar and philosopher of mind who is Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities at Columbia and chair of the university's philosophy department.

In 2006, Kitcher was awarded the inaugural Prometheus Prize from the American Philosophical Association in honor of extended achievement in the philosophy of science.

His teaching positions have included:

Vassar College: Assistant Professor 1973-1974
University of Vermont: Assistant Professor 1974-1978
University of Michigan: Visiting Assistant Professor 1979
University of Vermont: Associate Professor 1979-1983
University of Minnesota: Professor 1983-1986
University of California, San Diego: Professor 1986-1999
Columbia University: Professor 1998-present

His appointments and service have included:

Editorial Board, Philosophy of Science, 1985-1994.
Editor-in-Chief, Philosophy of Science, 1994-1999.
Governing Board, Philosophy of Science Association, 1987-1991.
Member NIH/DOE Working Group on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project, 1995-1997.
Representative of the American Philosophical Association to Section L of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1995-1998.
Member, Board of Officers, American Philosophical Association, 1996-99.
Philosophy Referee for John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1994—

[edit] Publications

Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism. MIT Press, 1982 (paperback 1983). ISBN 0-262-61037-X
The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge. Oxford University Press, 1983 (paperback 1984).
Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature. MIT Press, 1985 (paperback 1987).
The Advancement of Science, Oxford University Press, April 1993 (paper January 1995).
The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities (Simon and Schuster [U.S.], Penguin [U.K.], January 1996, paperback editions 1997).

The American paperback contains a postscript on cloning, almost identical with his article “Whose Self is it, Anyway?”.

Science, Truth, and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2001; paperback 2003.
In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology, Oxford University Press, 2003. (This is a collection of seventeen of his articles: articles numbers 21, 22, 24, 38, 43, 45, 51, 54, 55, 59, 70, 72, 82,83, 84, 92, 93).
Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s Ring, co-authored with Richard Schacht, Oxford University Press, February 2004. ISBN 0-19-517359-7