Search
    Site Map
    Contact Us
    National Office News
    APA Centennial

Meetings & Divisions
    Secretary-Treasurers
    Central
    Eastern
    Pacific
    Annual Meetings
    Paper Submissions
    Travel Stipends & Grants

Governance
    By-Laws
    Board of Officers
    Board Meeting Minutes
    Committees
    National Office
    History of the APA

Profession
    Data
    APA Statements
    Average Faculty Salaries
    2000-2001

Advertising
    Advertising
    Advertising in JFP
    Schedules & Deadlines

Resources
    Conferences, Seminars
      & Calls for Papers
    JobSeeker Database
    Teaching Committee's
      Online Resource Center
    Streaming Video
    Philosophy in the News
    Prizes & Awards
    Web Resources
    Department Web Sites
    Other Organizations of
      Related Interest

Publications & Apparel
    Directory of Publications
    Ordering
    APA T-Shirts
    Reprinting Policies &
      Permission Fees
  Public Archive:
    APA Newsletters
    Proceedings & Addresses
    Other Publications
    Schedules & Deadlines

Member Services
    Membership Info
    Becoming a Member
    Member Home Pages

Members Only Section
    Login
    Member Section Index
  Services:
    Membership Directory
  Resources:
    Jobs for Philosophers
    APA Newsletters
    Proceedings & Addresses
    Grants, Fellowships and Prizes
    Sabbatical Housing

Philosophy in the News

Obituary: Jerrold J. Katz, Renowned Linguistic Philosopher

Jerrold J. Katz, one of the world's leading linguistic philosophers, died Thursday, February 7, at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York. He was 69. The cause of death was bladder cancer.

Professor Katz was a pioneer in semantic theory and associated philosophical issues. His seminal book, Semantic Theory (Harper & Row, 1972), had an enormous impact on philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and the fledgling field of cognitive science. He showed that the question "what is meaning?" could be formally analyzed in a way that was compatible with modern syntactic theory.

Professor Katz's contributions were exceptionally broad, including linguistic semantics, philosophy of language, philosophy of linguistics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, metaphilosophy, and metaphysics.

Professor Katz had served as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York since 1975, and he lectured in philosophy and linguistics at universities throughout the world. Before coming to The Graduate Center, he taught and conducted research at M.I.T for 14 years. In his early career, he was associated with M.I.T.'s renowned linguist Noam Chomsky, and he became known for applying Chomsky's work in linguistics to philosophic problems.

Although Professor Katz began his work in the Chomskyan program, which saw linguistics as the study of mental grammars and therefore as part of psychology, he went on to reject that view. In Language and Other Abstract Objects (Rowan & Littlefield,1981; Basil Blackwell, 1981), the first study of the philosophy of linguistics, he developed the Platonist thesis that the subject matter of linguistics is abstract. He went on to relate his view of the nature of linguistic objects to the nature of mathematical objects and how knowledge of them is possible, as he wrote about in Metaphysics of Meaning (M.I.T. Press, 1990) and Realistic Rationalism (M.I.T. Press, 1998). He divided the sciences into empirical areas, like physics, and non-empirical areas, like linguistics and mathematics.

Central to Professor Katz's views was a Kantian approach to analytic truths, which he maintained in the face of popular critiques of analyticity by philosophers like Quine and Putnam. His persistence has resulted in a current revival of interest in and advocacy of the view.

On the day before his death, he signed a contract with Oxford University Press to publish his forthcoming book, Sense, Reference, and Philosophy. In this book he develops the far-reaching consequences for philosophy of adopting non-Fregean intensionalism. Katz shows that apparently intractable philosophical problems can be solved within non-Fregean intensionalism.

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1932, he received his B.A. from The George Washington University in 1954, served with the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps from 1954 to 1956, and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1960. He first went M.I.T. as a Research Associate in 1963 and rose to the rank of Professor of Philosophy, which he held until coming to the CUNY Graduate Center in 1975.

He wrote 10 books, co-wrote 1 book, edited 1 book, and co-edited 2 books, as well as publishing more than 70 papers. Among his awards and honors, he was a Senior Fellow at Harvard (1964-1965), a Guggenheim Fellow (1972-1973), and was presented with a Distinguished Alumni Scholar Award from The George Washington University in 1989.

Professor Katz played a central role in the Ph.D. Program in Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. His colleague Douglas Lackey said that "for 25 years, Professor Katz set the intellectual standard for our program --- the levels of clarity and rigor and intellectual depth to which we all aspired. He had a great gift for expounding his own ideas and an uncanny ability to penetrate to the heart of other people's positions. His presence for decades at our weekly departmental colloquium was a guarantee that sparks would fly, and that real thinking and real philosophy would be created before our eyes. We were all his students."

Professor Katz is survived by his wife, Virginia Valian --- Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Hunter College and The Graduate Center --- and two children from a prior marriage, Seth Katz and Jesse Katz.

Contact people:
Paul Postal - linguist at NYU and co-author, 914/ 472-1325
Paul Benacerraf - philosopher at Princeton, 609/ 258-4299; 609/924-1337
Ned Block - philosopher at NYU, 212/ 998-8322, 475-8006
Jaegwon Kim - philosopher at Brown, 401/ 863-2718, 1589; 401/ 521-3959
Arthur Collins - philosopher emeritis at CUNY Graduate Center, 212/ 988-2027
Paul Horwich - philosopher at CUNY Graduate Center, 212/ 817-8617; 212/ 505-9862
Philip Kitcher - philosopher at Columbia, 212/ 662-5812
Akeel Bilgrami - philosopher at Columbia, 212/ 854-6971; 316-2745
Douglas Lackey - philosopher at CUNY Graduate Center, 212/ 817-8615
Virginia Valian - spouse and professor at Hunter and Graduate Center, 212-595-2897