Richard Boyd

Richard Newell Boyd (May 19, 1942 – February 20, 2021) was an American philosopher, who spent most of his career teaching philosophy at Cornell University where he was Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters Emeritus. He specialized in epistemology, the philosophy of science, language, and mind. Education and career Boyd became interested in the philosophy of science during his undergraduate studies for a mathematics major at MIT for which he was awarded an S.B. in 1963. He then, at the same institution and under the directorship of Richard Cartwright, went on to earn his Ph.D in 1970 with a doctoral thesis on mathematical logic titled A Recursion-Theoretic Characterization of the Ramified Analytical Hierarchy. (He would also co-author, with Gustav Hensel and Hilary Putnam, a 1969 paper by this title.) After teaching at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Berkeley, Boyd taught, from 1972, at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. In 1981 he was appointed as the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy there, a position he retained until his retirement, as professor emeritus, in 2017. Boyd held visiting positions at Claremont-McKenna College (2012), the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand (2016), and the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. And, after his retirement from Cornell, he also taught at Lewis & Clark College.