James Higginbotham


James Higginbotham FBA was a distinguished professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He taught previously at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and at the University of Oxford as a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.

Education and career

Higginbotham earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University in 1973 under the supervision of Sidney Morgenbesser and Charles Parsons. He taught at Columbia until 1980, when he moved to MIT as associate professor of philosophy and linguistics. In 1993, he became Professor of General Linguistics at Oxford University, a position he held until moving to University of Southern California in 2000.
He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995 and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2011.
Higginbotham edited the Journal of Philosophy when he was on the faculty at Columbia University. He was also the editor of the OUP series in cognitive science and the associate editor of Pragmatics and Cognition.

Philosophical and linguistic work