David Kelley (born June 23, 1949 in Shaker Heights, Ohio) is an American philosopher, author, and advocate of Objectivism, though his position that Objectivism can be revised and influenced by other schools of thought has prompted disagreements with other Objectivists. He is also founder and senior fellow of The Atlas Society.
Kelley is trained as a philosopher. He received his BA and MA in philosophy from Brown University, where he studied with the American rationalist, Roderick Chisholm. He received his PhD in 1975 from Princeton University, where his advisor was the American postmodernist Richard Rorty. He was an assistant professor of philosophy and cognitive science for 7 years at Vassar College. He then taught logic for a brief time at Brandeis University, while working as a freelance writer for Barron's Magazine and other publications.
A member of Ayn Rand's circle, Kelley read her favorite poem, "If—", by Rudyard Kipling, at her funeral in 1982.
David Kelley (born 1949) is an American philosopher and author.
David Kelley may also refer to:
David Humiston Kelley (April 1, 1924 in Albany, New York – May 19, 2011) was a Canadian American archaeologist and epigrapher, most noted for his work on the phonetic analysis and major contributions toward the decipherment of the writing system used by the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, the Maya script.
David Kelley was a descendant of Amos Humiston, a Union Army soldier who was killed at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.
From the late 1950s, he was one of the first Mayanist scholars to give credence to the theories of the Russian linguist and ethnographer Yuri Knorozov concerning the phonetic and syllabic nature of the Maya script, which would later lead to breakthroughs in the script's decipherment. Kelley's landmark 1962 paper, Phoneticism in the Maya Script, would provide important corroborating data of the phonetic interpretation of Maya glyphs, which ran counter to the then-prevailing view that the script lacked phonetic elements.
In addition to his work on scripts and linguistics, he worked on calendrics and archaeoastronomy, particularly on application of archaeoastronomical data to the Maya calendar correlation problem. Kelley and Eugene Milone co-authored Exploring Ancient Skies: An Encyclopedic Survey of Archaeoastronomy (Springer, 2005).