Richard Newell Boyd (b. 19 May 1942, Washington, D.C.; Ph.D. MIT 1970) is an American philosopher who has spent most of his career at Cornell University,[1] though he also taught briefly at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Berkeley. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
He is well-known in philosophy of science circles as a philosophical realist and a scientific realist. In moral philosophy circles he is a leading defender of moral realism. His co-edited book The Philosophy of Science (ISBN 0-262-52156-3) is widely used in undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses. He has also made important contributions to the development of Cornell realism, a distinctly naturalistic position in moral philosophy.
Boyd's doctoral thesis, directed by Hilary Putnam, is called "A recursion-theoretic characterization of the ramified analytical hierarchy", and his degree was one of the first Ph.Ds awarded in philosophy by MIT.