Biography
Jerry Fodor was born in New York City in 1935, of Jewish descent. He received his A.B. degree (summa cum laude) from Columbia University in 1956, where he studied with Sydney Morgenbesser, and a PhD in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, under the direction of Hilary Putnam. From 1959 to 1986 Fodor was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1986 to 1988 he was a full professor at the City University of New York (CUNY). Since 1988 he has been State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Besides his interest in philosophy, Fodor passionately follows opera and regularly writes popular columns for the London Review of Books on that and other topics.
One of Fodor's former colleagues at Rutgers, the New Mysterian philosopher Colin McGinn, described Fodor in these words:
"Fodor (who is now a close friend) is a gentle man inside a burly body, and prone to an even burlier style of arguing. He is shy and voluble at the same time ... a formidable polemicist burdened with a sensitive soul.... Disagreeing with Jerry on a philosophical issue, especially one dear to his heart can be a chastening experience.... His quickness of mind, inventiveness, and sharp wit are not to be tangled with before your first cup of coffee in the morning. Adding Jerry Fodor to the faculty at Rutgers instantly put it on the map, Fodor being by common consent the leading philosopher of mind in the world today. I had met him in England in the seventies and ... found him to be the genuine article, intellectually speaking (though we do not always see eye to eye)."
Fodor is a member of the honorary societies Phi Beta Kappa and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous awards and honors: New York State Regent's Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (Princeton University), Chancellor Greene Fellow (Princeton University), Fulbright Fellowship (Oxford University), Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He won the first Jean Nicod Prize for philosophy of mind and cognitive philosophy in 1993. His lecture series for the Prize, later published as a book by MIT Press in 1995, was titled The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics. In 1996–1997, Fodor delivered the prestigious John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford, titled Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, which went on to become his 1998 Oxford University Press book of the same name. He has also delivered the Patrick Romanell Lecture on Philosophical Naturalism (2004) and the Royce Lecture on Philosophy of Mind (2002) to the American Philosophical Association, of whose Eastern Division he has served as Vice President (2004–2005) and President (2005–2006) .
He lives in New York with his wife, the linguist Janet Dean Fodor, and has two grown children.
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