Susan Haack b. 1945

Susan Haack is a British-American philosopher, distinguished professor at the University of Miami, and one of the leading defenders of pragmatism and epistemological responsibility in contemporary analytic philosophy. Evidence and Inquiry developed her foundherentist theory of knowledge, mediating between pure foundationalism and pure coherentism through the metaphor of the crossword puzzle, while Defending Science Within Reason mounted a sustained critique of both naive scientism and postmodern skepticism. Her shorter essays, in Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate and Putting Philosophy to Work, have made her one of the most clear-eyed contemporary defenders of inquiry as a moral and intellectual virtue.

Susan Haack was born in Britain in July 1945. She read philosophy and psychology at St Hilda's College, Oxford, took her bachelor's in 1966, her master's and BPhil at Oxford in 1969, and her doctorate at Cambridge in 1972 under Timothy Smiley. She lectured at the University of Warwick from 1971 to 1990 and from 1990 has taught at the University of Miami, where she is now Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, professor of philosophy, and Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, with a joint appointment in law.

Her books include Deviant Logic (1974), Philosophy of Logics (1978), Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (1993), Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (1998), Defending Science—Within Reason (2003), Putting Philosophy to Work (2008), Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (2014), and Scientism and its Discontents (2017).

Haack is best known for 'foundherentism', a theory of epistemic justification that combines the empirical anchoring of foundationalism with the mutual support of coherentism, modelled on the analogy of a crossword puzzle. She has defended a moderate scientific realism against both Rortyan deflationism and the strong programmes in the sociology of science, applied her epistemology to scientific evidence in legal proceedings, and revived a Peircean critical common-sensism as a guide to inquiry.