Roderick Chisholm 1916 – 1999

Roderick Milton Chisholm was an American philosopher and one of the principal figures of mid-twentieth-century American analytic metaphysics and epistemology. He spent his entire teaching career at Brown University, where he chaired the philosophy department for many years and trained many of the leading metaphysicians of the next generation. His Theory of Knowledge developed a systematic internalist epistemology of evident propositions and made the Gettier problem a central topic of the field, while Person and Object defended a robust account of the self as an enduring substance and offered a libertarian agent-causal theory of free will. His work in the philosophy of mind and intentionality reshaped American metaphysics.