Robert Stalnaker
Robert C. Stalnaker (born 1940) is an American Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Education and career
He earned his BA from Wesleyan University and earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1965. His thesis advisor was Stuart Hampshire, though he was strongly influenced by another faculty member, Carl Hempel. Stalnaker taught briefly at Yale University and the University of Illinois, and then for many years at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University before joining the MIT faculty in 1988. He plans to retire from MIT in 2016. His many students include Jason Stanley, Zoltan Szabo and Delia Graff Fara.
In 2007, Stalnaker delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University on the topic of "Our Knowledge of the Internal World."
Philosophical work
His work concerns, among other things, the philosophical foundations of semantics, pragmatics, philosophical logic, decision theory, game theory, the theory of conditionals, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. But all of these interests are in the service of addressing the problem of intentionality, "what it is to represent the world in both speech and thought". In his work, he seeks to provide a naturalistic account of intentionality, characterizing representation in terms of causal and modal notions.
