Alexander Rosenberg is an American philosopher, and the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University.
Rosenberg was educated at Stuyvesant High School, the City College of New York and Johns Hopkins University. He received the Lakatos Award in 1993 and was the National Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Lecturer in 2006.
He describes himself as a naturalist.[1]
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His early work focused on the philosophy of social science and especially the philosophy of economics. His doctoral dissertation, published as Microeconomic Laws in 1976, was the first treatment of the nature of economics by a contemporary philosopher of science. Over the period of the next decade he became increasingly skeptical about neoclassical economics as an empirical theory.
Rosenberg later shifted to work on issues in the philosophy of science that are raised by biology. He became especially interested in the relationship between molecular biology and other parts of biology. Rosenberg introduced the concept of supervenience to the treatment of intertheoretical relations in biology, soon after Donald Davidson began to exploit Richard Hare's notion in the philosophy of psychology. Rosenberg is among the few biologists and fewer philosophers of science who reject the consensus view that combines physicalism with antireductionism (see his 2010 on-line debate with John Dupré at Philosophy TV).
Rosenberg also coauthored an influential book on David Hume with Tom Beauchamp, Hume and the Problem of Causation, arguing that Hume was not a skeptic about induction but an opponent of rationalist theories of inductive inference.
Rosenberg's interests in social science and biology led him to write a series of papers on the bearing of differences in biological endowment on equality, the treatment of intellectual property rights in biotechnological discoveries, and the arguments advanced in the 1990s for sequencing the human genome.
In 2009 Rosenberg participated in on-line debates about economics prompted by the 2008 recession and by Paul Krugman's assessment of economic theory's response to it.
Rosenberg’s treatment of fitness as a supervenient property which is undefined concept in the theory of natural selection is criticized by Brandon and Beatty.[2] His original development of how the supervenience of Mendelian concepts blocks traditional derivational reduction was examined critically by C. Kenneth Waters.[3] His later account of reduction in developmental biology were criticized by Gunter Wagner.[4] Elliot Sober's "Multiple realization arguments against reductionism"[5] reflects a shift towards Rosenberg's critique of anti-reductionist arguments of Putnam's and Fodor's.
But Elliot Sober has also challenged Rosenberg’s view that the principle of natural selection is the only biological law.[6]
The explanatory role of the principle of natural selection and the nature of evolutionary probabilities defended by Rosenberg were subject to counter arguments by Brandon[7] and later by Dennis Walsh.[8] Rosenberg's account of the nature of drift and the role of probability in the theory of natural selection draws on significant parallels between the principle of natural selection and the second law of thermodynamics.
In the philosophy of social science, Rosenberg’s more skeptical views about microeconomics were challenged first by Wade Hands[9] and later by Daniel Hausman in several books and articles.[10] The financial crisis of 2008-09 resulted in renewed attention to Rosenberg's skeptical views about microeconomics. Biologist Richard Lewontin and historian Joseph Fracchia express skepticism about Rosenberg’s claim that functional explanations in social science require Darwinian underlying mechanisms.[11]
Rosenberg was associate director of the Arts and Sciences College Honors Program at Syracuse University, established the University Honors Program at the University of California, Riverside and directed the honors program at the University of Georgia. At Georgia he redesigned and organized the Foundation Fellows Program. Since 2007 he has been the director of the Angier B. Duke Memorial Scholarship Program.[12]