Irving Thalberg Jr. (August 25, 1930 – 1988) was the son of 1930s Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg and Academy award-winning actress Norma Shearer. He taught philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The Thalberg family lived at 707 Ocean Front Drive in Los Angeles. Irving Jr. was only six years old when his father died from pneumonia at the age of thirty-seven. He was educated at Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland and attended Stanford University. He was a teacher of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago until he died of cancer in 1988.
Irving's obituary from the New York Times: Irving G. Thalberg Jr., a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the son of the late Irving Thalberg, the movie producer, died of cancer Friday at his home in Syracuse. He was 56 years old and also lived in Chicago and Aspen, Colo. Professor Thalberg, whose mother was Norma Shearer, the late movie actress, was born in Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1960. He taught at Oberlin College from 1960 to 1963 and at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1965. He was also a visiting professor at several universities, including Fudan University in Shanghai. He was the author of three books and numerous articles, his essays appearing in many journals and philosophical anthologies. He is survived by his wife, Deborah Pellow of Syracuse; three daughters, Shoshana Thalberg of Chicago, Deborah of Los Angeles and Elana of Winston-Salem, N.C., and a sister, Katharine Thalberg of Aspen.
He published two books of philosophical studies through the Muirhead Library of Philosophy: "Enigmas of Agency," Allen & Unwin, London, 1972, and "Perception, Emotion & Action," Blackwells, Oxford, 1977.
Unlike most epistemologists, Thalberg published articles that defended the Platonic tripartite analysis of knowledge (justified true belief, a.k.a. "JTB") against the more popular view that Gettier counterexamples refuted the JTB account. Specifically, Thalberg argued that justification is not transmissible through valid deduction.