Ruth Barcan Marcus

Senior Research Scholar, Reuben Post Halleck, Emeritus
602 SSS
203.432.6033 ruth.marcus@yale.edu

Areas of Interests

Modal Logic, Philosophy of Logic, Analytical Philosophy, Topics in Ethics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology.

Education

PhD 1946, Yale University
BA 1941, NYU

Academic Appointments

• Prior to 1973: Chair of University of Illinois–Chicago Philosophy Department, then Professor at Northwestern University.
• Since 1973: Halleck Professor at Yale, 1992, and then Senior Research Scholar at Yale and Visiting Distinguished Professor (One term per year) at UC, Irvine

Abbreviated List of Offices Held

• Diverse service on editorial boards, and on external advisory panels on programs, grants and awards.
• Chairman of the National Board of Officers (1967–83)
• President of the Central Division (1976–78) of the American Philosophical association
• President of the Institute Internationale de Philosophie (1990–93)
  • President honoraire (1994–)
• President of the Association for Symbolic Logic (1982–84)
• Steering Committee of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (1985–2000)
• President of the Elizabethan Club (1989–90).

Research Fellowships

• Guggenheim Fellow (1953)
• NSF Fellow (1963)
• Stanford Center in Behavioral Sciences Fellow (1979)
• Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Edinburgh (1983), Wolfson College at Oxford (1985, 1986)
• Clare Hall at Cambridge (1988)
• Wolfson College , Oxford , 1982-83.
• Mellon Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center (1992–93).

Awards

• Wilbur Cross Medal, Yale, 2000.
• Medal of the College de France (1986)
• Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, University of Illinois (1995)
• Machette Prize, for contributions to the profession
• Fellow since 1977 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• Quinn Prize for contributions to philosophy and philosophers.

Recent Courses Taught

• Early Analytic Philosophy and Conflict
• Philosophy of Logic

Selected Publications (frequently reprinted)

Books

• The Logical Enterprise, ed. with A. Anderson, R. Martin, Yale, 1995
• Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, VII, eds. R. Barcan Marcus et al., North Holland, 1986
• Modalities: Philosophical Essays, Oxford University Press, 1993. Paperback; 1995

Articles

Published under Ruth C. Barcan:

• “A Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication”; Journal of Symbolic Logic, 11, 1946.
• “The Identity of Individuals in a Strict Functional Calculus of Second Order”; Journal of Symbolic Logic. 12, 1947.
• “The Deduction Theorem in a Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication”; Journal of Symbolic Logic, 12, 1947.

Published under Ruth Barcan Marcus or Ruth B. Marcus (sometimes indexed under ‘Barcan Marcus’)

• “Extensionality”; Mind, LXIX, ns. 273, 1960. Reprinted in: Reference and Modality, ed. L. Linsky, Oxford , 1971. Italian translation of Reference and Modality, Bompiani, Milan , 1984.
• “Moral Dilemmas and Consistency”; Journal of Philosophy, LXXVII, No. 3, 1980. Reprinted in: The Philosophers Annual, 1980 (Best Papers of 1980) and elsewhere.
• “Rationality and Believing the Impossible”; Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXXV, No. 6, June 1983.
• “Some Revisionary Proposals About Belief and Believing”; Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1990. Reprinted in: Causality, Method and Modality, ed. Gordon, Brittain, Kluwer, 1991.
• “The Anti–Naturalism of Some Language Centered Accounts of Belief”; Dialectica (Special Issue), 1995.