American Philosophical Association - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The American Philosophical Association is the main professional organization

Professional body

A professional association is usually a nonprofit organization seeking to further a particular profession, the interests of individuals engaged in that profession, and the public interest.The roles of these professional associations have been variously defined: "A group of people in a...

for philosophers in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. Founded in 1900, its mission is to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarly activity in philosophy, to facilitate the professional work and teaching of philosophers, and to represent philosophy as a discipline.

The Association has three divisions - Pacific, Central and Eastern. Each division organises a large annual conference. The biggest of these is the Eastern Division Meeting, which usually attracts around 2,000 philosophers and takes place in a different east coast city each December. The Eastern Division Meeting is also the USA's largest recruitment event for philosophy jobs, with numerous universities sending teams to interview candidates for academic posts. By tradition, the two evening receptions—the first of which features free beer and wine—are referred to as 'smokers' -- a carry over from the days where everyone would be smoking. These events serve the dual purpose of informally continuing interviews and catching up with friends from across the country.

The Presidency of a Division of the American Philosophical Association is considered to be a professional honor. Recent presidents of the Eastern Division include Paul Guyer

Paul Guyer

Paul Guyer, a Professor of Philosophy and F.R.C. Murray Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the world's foremost scholars of Kant. Guyer also serves on the Graduate Groups for both Germanic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature...

, Edward S. Casey, Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett

Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...

, Virginia Held, John Cooper

John Cooper

John Cooper may refer to:* John A. D. Cooper , American physician & educator* John B.R. Cooper , California pioneer* John Cooper, current director of the Sundance Film Festival...

, T.M. Scanlon, Alexander Nehamas

Alexander Nehamas

Alexander Nehamas is Professor of philosophy and Edmund N. Carpenter, II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Nietzsche, Foucault, and literary theory....

, Ernest Sosa

Ernest Sosa

Ernest Sosa is an American philosopher primarily interested in epistemology. He is currently Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has been at Rutgers full-time since January, 2007; previously, he had been at Brown University since 1964...

, Jerry Fodor

Jerry Fodor

Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...

, Seyla Benhabib

Seyla Benhabib

Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University, and director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, and a well-known contemporary philosopher. She is the author of several books, most notably about the philosophers Hannah Arendt and...

, Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanaian-British-American philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Kwame Anthony Appiah grew up in Ghana and earned a Ph.D. at Cambridge...

, Christine Korsgaard

Christine Korsgaard

Christine Marion Korsgaard is an American philosopher and academic whose main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal...

, and Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick was an American political philosopher, most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia , a right-libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice...

. Recent presidents of the Central Division include Peter van Inwagen

Peter van Inwagen

Peter van Inwagen is an American analytic philosopher and the John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He previously taught at Syracuse University and earned his PhD from the University of Rochester under the direction of Richard Taylor and Keith Lehrer...

, Ted Cohen

Ted Cohen

Ted Cohen is an American digital entertainment industry executive. Having served in senior management positions at EMI Music, Warner Bros...

, Eleonore Stump, Karl Ameriks

Karl Ameriks

Karl P. Ameriks is an American philosopher. He is the McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Ameriks studied at Yale University, A.B., summa cum laude , Ph.D. , where he wrote his thesis under the direction of Karsten Harries...

, Stephen Darwall, Marcia Baron, Allan Gibbard

Allan Gibbard

Allan Gibbard is the Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Allan Gibbard has made several contributions to contemporary ethical theory, in particular metaethics...

, Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher and the emeritus John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics, and Christian apologetics...

, Elliott Sober

Elliott Sober

Elliott Sober is Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin–Madison. Sober is noted for his work in philosophy of biology and general philosophy of science. Sober taught for one year at Stanford University and has...

, Claudia Card and Lawrence Sklar

Lawrence Sklar

Lawrence Sklar is an American philosopher. He is the Carl G. Hempel and William K. Frankena Distinguished UniversityProfessor at the University of Michigan. He specialises in the Philosophy of Physics, approaching a wide range of issues from a position best described as highly sceptical of many of...

. Recent presidents of the Pacific Division include Calvin Normore

Calvin Normore

Calvin Normore is a philosopher at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he holds the Macdonald Chair of Moral Philosophy since Fall 2008. He is also professor of Philosophy in the UCLA Department of Philosophy...

, Jeffrie Murphy, Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley....

, Richard Wollheim

Richard Wollheim

Richard Arthur Wollheim was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting...

, and Paul Churchland

Paul Churchland

Paul Churchland is a philosopher noted for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. He is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Valtz Chair of Philosophy. Churchland holds a joint appointment with the Cognitive Science Faculty and...

.

The American Philosophical Association awards several prizes. A prominent example is the American Philosophical Association Book Prize (formerly known as the Matchette Prize), one of the oldest prizes in philosophy. It is awarded biannually to the best book published in the field over a two-year period by a scholar 40 or younger at the time of publication. It has been won by such figures as David Kellogg Lewis

David Kellogg Lewis

David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton from 1970 until his death. He is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years...

, Lawrence Sklar,http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/0203/Sep30_02/fac-sklar.html Bas van Fraassen, Michael Friedman, Loran Lomasky, Paul Guyer

Paul Guyer

, John Cooper, Ted Sider, and Michael Smith. Another of the most distinguished prizes is the Royce Lectures in the philosophy of mind, awarded to a distinguished philosopher every four years. They have been delivered by Robert Stalnaker

Robert Stalnaker

Robert C. Stalnaker is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2007, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University on the topic of Our Knowledge of the Internal World...

, Jerry Fodor

Jerry Fodor

, Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam

Hilary Whitehall Putnam is an American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science...

, Sydney Shoemaker

Sydney Shoemaker

Sydney Shoemaker is an American philosopher. Until his retirement, he was a Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He holds a PhD from Cornell and BA from Reed. In 1971, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University...

, Saul Kripke

Saul Kripke

Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center...

, and Elizabeth Anscombe. Another such prize is the "Rockefeller Prize". The Rockefeller Prize ($1000) is awarded every two years for the best unpublished article length work in philosophy by a non-academically affiliated philosopher. The winner's work will be published in The Journal of Value Inquiry at the behest of the winner and the journal.

External links

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The first presidential address of the APA, given by J. E. Creighton on March 31, 1902: The Purposes of a Philosophical Association, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 219–237.
1926, H. N. Gardiner, The First Twenty-Five Years of the American Philosophical Association, The Philosophical Review; Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 145–58.
1985, David A. Hoekema, A Decade at Delaware: Some Notes on the Recent History of the APA, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association; Vol. 59, No. 1, pp. 35–44.
1991, Proceedings of the Special Session on the History of the Central Division (contributions from Marcus Singer, Lewis Hahn, Robert Turnbull, Frederick Will, and William Hay), Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 65, No. 3, pp. 47–65.

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