Richard Boyd

Richard Newell Boyd (born 19 May 1942, Washington, D.C., USA; 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 has been a leading defender of scientific realism, the idea that scientific claims about unobservable entities should be understood as literally true. In ethics, he is a leading defender of a naturalistic brand of moral realism, arguing that moral facts should be understood to supervene on clusters of natural properties. 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 associated with Boyd, his colleague Nicholas Sturgeon, and David O. Brink, a Cornell graduate and philosopher at the University of California, San Diego.

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.

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References