Philip Kitcher


Philip Stuart Kitcher is a British philosophy professor teaching at Columbia University who specialises in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of literature, and, more recently, pragmatism.

Life and career

Born in London, Kitcher spent his early life in Eastbourne, East Sussex, on the south coast of the United Kingdom. He went to school at Christ's Hospital, Horsham, West Sussex. He earned his B.A. in Mathematics/History and Philosophy of Science from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1969, and his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from Princeton University in 1974, where he worked closely with Carl Hempel and Thomas Kuhn.
Kitcher currently teaches at Columbia University in the Department of Philosophy where he holds an appointment as the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy. As chair of Columbia's Contemporary Civilization program, he also holds the James R. Barker Professorship of Contemporary Civilization. Before moving to Columbia, Kitcher taught at the University of Vermont, Vassar College, The University of Minnesota, University of Michigan, and for several years at University of California, San Diego where he held the position of Presidential Professor of Philosophy.
Kitcher is past president of the American Philosophical Association. In 2002, Kitcher was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was awarded the inaugural Prometheus Prize from the American Philosophical Association in 2006 in honour of extended achievement in the philosophy of science.
He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
Kitcher was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Philosophy of Science from 1994-1999, was also a member of the NIH/DOE Working Group on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project from 1995 to 1997.
He has trained a number of prominent philosophers of science, including Peter Godfrey-Smith, Kyle Stanford, and Michael R. Dietrich. He also taught C. Kenneth Waters and Michael Weisberg as undergraduates.
He is married to Patricia Kitcher. She is a well known Kant scholar and philosopher of mind who has been the Mark Van Doren Professor of Humanities at Columbia.

Philosophical work

Within philosophy, Kitcher is best known for his work in philosophy of biology, science, and mathematics, and outside academia for his work examining creationism and sociobiology. His works attempt to connect the questions raised in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mathematics with the central philosophical issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. He has also published papers on John Stuart Mill, Kant and other figures in the history of philosophy. His 2012 book documented his developing interest in John Dewey and a pragmatic approach to philosophical issues. He sees pragmatism as providing a unifying and reconstructive approach to traditional philosophy issues. He had, a year earlier, published a book outlining a naturalistic approach to ethics, The Ethical Project. He has also done work on the philosophy of climate change.

Criteria for what constitutes 'good science'

Kitcher's three criteria for good science are:
He increasingly recognised the role of values in practical decisions about scientific research

Kuhn and creationism

Kitcher is the author of Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism. He has commented on the way creationists have misinterpreted Kuhn:
Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has probably been more widely read—and more widely misinterpreted—than any other book in the recent philosophy of science. The broad circulation of his views has generated a popular caricature of Kuhn's position. According to this popular caricature, scientists working in a field belong to a club. All club members are required to agree on main points of doctrine. Indeed, the price of admission is several years of graduate education, during which the chief dogmas are inculcated. The views of outsiders are ignored. Now I want to emphasize that this is a hopeless caricature, both of the practice of scientists and of Kuhn's analysis of the practice. Nevertheless, the caricature has become commonly accepted as a faithful representation, thereby lending support to the Creationists' claims that their views are arrogantly disregarded.

Books