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.

Roderick Milton Chisholm was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in November 1916. He took his bachelor's at Brown in 1938 and his doctorate at Harvard in 1942 under D. W. Prall and C. I. Lewis, with intervening service in the United States Army during the war. He returned in 1947 to Brown, where he spent his entire career, eventually as Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities and chairman of the department; he served as president of both the American Philosophical Association and the Metaphysical Society of America.

His books include Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (1957), Theory of Knowledge (1966, with revised editions in 1977 and 1989), Person and Object (1976), The First Person (1981), The Foundations of Knowing (1982), Brentano and Meinong Studies (1982), On Metaphysics (1989), and A Realistic Theory of Categories (1996). He was the principal English-language translator and expositor of Brentano and Meinong.

Chisholm developed a strict foundationalist epistemology in which the directly evident is the basis of empirical justification, articulated through ever-finer epistemic categories and confronted in his hands with the problem of the criterion. His metaphysics defended agent causation and libertarian free will, an austere ontology of states of affairs and individuals, and a distinctive treatment of self-attribution and intentionality. He died in Providence in January 1999.