Professor of Law Susan Haack was educated at Oxford (B.A., 1966, B.Phil. 1968), and Cambridge (Ph.D.,1972). She was a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge (1968-71), and then Lecturer (1971-6), Reader (1976-82), and Professor of Philosophy (1982-90) at the University of Warwick, U.K. Since 1990 she has taught at the University of Miami, where she is presently Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Law, teaching each year a course for the philosophy department, an interdisciplinary course for the College of Arts and Sciences, and a course in the Law School. In 1997-8 she was national Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Professor of Philosophy; and in the course of her career she has held visiting professorships at the University of Guelph (Canada), the University of Cape Town (South Africa), the University of Virginia, the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), Aarhus University (Denmark), and (in the faculty of laws) the University of Bologna, as well as a Fellowship in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, and a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton.
Haack is the author of Deviant Logic; Philosophy of Logics; Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology; Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic: Beyond the Formalism; Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays; and Defending Science -- Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism; and the editor of Pragmatism, Old and New: Selected Writings. She has also published numerous articles in professional philosophy journals, in scientific publications including the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Proceedings of the New York Academy of Sciences, Epidemiology, and The American Journal of Public Health. Haack also published articles in legal journals such as the American Journal of Jurisprudence and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and magazines like The Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry, The Times Literary Supplement, Partisan Review, New Literary History, and The New Criterion.
The distinction between deviant and extended logics that Haack articulated in her first book is still cited by writers in the field more than 30 years later; the book remains in print, now in a new, expanded edition. Haack's second book, Philosophy of Logics, continuously in print in English since 1978 and translated into six languages from Portuguese to Korean, has long been valued for its scope and clarity by students and teachers not only in philosophy but also in linguistics, psychology, etc.. This book is cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, on the logical meaning of "variable."
With Evidence and Inquiry, Haack turned her attention to a new field: epistemology. This book has also appeared in Spanish and Chinese editions. Here Haack presents a new theory of evidence, "Foundherentism." The new term, and the new theory, is now represented in the Dictionary of Modern Thought published jointly by Fontana and Norton; several chapters of the book have been anthologized -- including one in a volume edited by Baroness Warnock, Women Philosophers, "from Anne Conway in the seventeenth century to Susan Haack in the twentieth"; and Haack's paper summarizing the key ideas of Foundherentism has been anthologized half-a-dozen times. The crossword analogy on which Haack relied in this book to articulate the structure of evidence has been found helpful not only by philosophers, but also by economists, medical scientists, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars.
With Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate -- described by a reviewer in Spain as “a passionate work, and obligatory reading,” by a reviewer in Canada as “a deep and splendid book,” and by a reviewer in Sweden as “a refusal to lay down the arms of philosophical analysis, instead to use them where they have most bite” -- Haack brought her analytic skills to bear not only on issues in metaphysics and philosophy of language, but also on issues of public concern such as multiculturalism and feminism, the state of the academy, and on the future of philosophy itself.
In Defending Science -- Within Reason – was described in Publishers' Weekly as offering "one thought-provoking discussion after another," in The New Scientist as "analytic and colorful, learned and fun," in The Times Higher Education Supplement as “exceptionally thoughtful,” and in the Journal of Chemical Education as “a marvelous book, not to be missed,” and reviewed in the Netherlands under the delightful title “Forget Popper – Read Susan Haack!”-- Haack has continued to expand her range as she tackles not only questions about scientific evidence and scientific method but also the relation of science and literature, the tensions between science and religion, the role of scientific testimony in court, and predictions of the end of science. This book has been used in a seminar at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics, and by the members of the Leverhulme Evidence Project; it was the subject of a lecture series Dr. Haack gave in the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City in the summer of 2005. A Chinese edition is under contract.
Haack’s newest book, Pragmatism, Old and New (with associate editor Robert Lane) appeared in early spring 2006. A volume of essays on her work, entitled "Susan Haack: A Lady of Distinctions"--is also scheduled to appear in 2006.
Haack’s papers -- more than forty of which have been reprinted or anthologized, some several times, and/or translated, some into several languages – have also been influential. Her 1977 paper tracing Kantian elements in Carnap's Aufbau is now acknowledged as having broken new ground. Another piece from the same year appeared in Spanish translation twenty years later in a volume of new work on Peirce and Popper, and is now acknowledged as a pioneering paper on this topic. Two 1978 pieces of hers on topics in metaphysics were reprinted in a recent anthology; and Haack's critique of fuzzy logic, first published in 1979, is still cited and requested by electrical engineers. Among her recent papers, “Knowledge and Propaganda: Reflections of an Old Feminist,” “Staying for an answer,” “’We Pragmatists …’: Peirce and Rorty in Conversation,” “Reflections on Relativism: From Momentous Tautology to Seductive Contradiction,” and “As for that phrase ‘studying in a literary spirit’ …” have proven especially popular; her “Trial and Error: The Supreme Court’s Philosophy of Science,” first published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2005, will be reprinted in the International Society of Barristers Quarterly in summer 2006.
Haack's recent work is strongly interdisciplinary. Since she began to interest herself in issues in philosophy of science she has spoken with Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg and physicist/historian of science Gerald Holton at a panel on "What Can the Natural Sciences Know, and How Do They Know It?"; at a conference on "The Flight From Science and Reason" at the New York Academy; with Nobelist Jerome Friedman and historian of science Peter Galison on a panel on the Humanities and the Sciences organized by the ACLS; at Yale's Seminar on Issues in Science and the Humanities; at the seminar on evidence at the LSE – to mention just a few.
Haack's paper, "An Epistemologist in the Bramble Bush: At the Supreme Court with Mr. Joiner," was used as background material for a panel on Science-Based Medical Evidence at the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, published with the panelists' papers as the lead article in a special issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, and shortly thereafter excerpted in George Fisher's recent textbook on the law of evidence. A talk Haack gave in a symposium on Law and Truth at Yale Law School has appeared in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Haack has written papers on science and the law for Daedalus, for two conferences on Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, for a conference on the "New Evidence Scholarship" at Cardozo Law School, and for the World Congress of the Internationale Vereinigung fur Rechtsund Sozialphilosophie in Lund, Sweden, in 2003. (She will again be a plenary speaker at the IVR conference in August 2007.)
In fall 2004 Haack gave the Olin Lecture in Jurisprudence at Notre Dame Law School; in spring 2005 she gave a series of lectures as Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Laws at the University of Bologna; in summer 2005 she spoke at the Instituto de Investigaciones Juridicas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; in fall 2005 she spoke at a National Institute of Justice conference on science and law; in spring 2006 she gave her third presentation at a conference organized by the Project of Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy, this time on litigation-driven science; and in summer 2006 she spoke in the Faculty of Laws at the Universities of Kraków and Oslo.
Haack’s work in jurisprudence now includes, besides the Olin lecture (“Epistemology Legalized: Or, Truth, Justice, and the American Way”), published in The American Journal of Jurisprudence in 2005, a paper entitled “On Legal Pragmatism: Where does ‘The Path of the Law’ Lead Us?”, which appeared the following year in the same journal, and a recently completed paper entitled “On Logic in the Law: ‘Something, but not all,” forthcoming in Ratio Juris.
Haack serves on the Editorial Board of Philosophy, Science, and Law, and the Advisory Board of Ratio Juris, and edited an issue of the American Philosophical Association's Newsletter on Philosophy and Law on Science in the Law, which appeared in the fall of 2003. She has worked with the Miami-Dade Public Defender's office on cases involving scientific testimony.
Haack has also explored issues in philosophy of literature: she has written on metaphor in Manifesto; articulated similarities and differences between science and literature in Defending Science; published an article in The New Criterion on the feminist philosophy implicit in Dorothy Sayers' detective novel, Gaudy Night; and, most recently, a paper on Samuel Butler's The Way of all Flesh , “The Ideal of Intellectual Integrity, in Life and Literature,” presented at a conference on "virtue epistemology," which appeared in New Literary History in 2005.
Haack's writing is known for its clarity, directness, tough-mindedness, and humor. Referring to her Manifesto, celebrated economist Robert Heilbroner asked: "Is it possible for a philosopher to have a kindly heart, a wicked wit, a passion for clarity, and a conclusive argument that crossword puzzles are, for thinkers, what laboratories are for scientists?" and replied: "It is, if her name is Susan Haack." And in his Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Critics, Steven Weinberg described Haack as "one of those rare contemporary philosophers I can read with pleasure." In 2006 she was the recipient of the Forkosch Award for excellence in writing given by the Council for Secular Humanism.
Haack is also in demand for speaking engagements. In the past, her speaking engagements have taken her not only to numerous philosophy departments and law schools, but also to departments of English, Humanities Institutes, Liberal Arts programs, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, and various scientific conferences. She has given many named and endowed public lectures and lecture series, including, most recently, besides the Olin Lecture at Notre Dame, the Wunsch Lecture at the Technion (Israel). In 2007 she is scheduled to give the Stanislaw Kaminski Memorial Lectures at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin and the Sellars Lecture at Bucknell University.
Haack's work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Korean, Chinese, and Croatian; and she has lectured at universities, colleges, and conferences not only across the US and Canada, but in 25 countries around the world -- including, in 2004, an extended lecture tour of China, during which she gave eleven lectures at six universities in four cities. She is joint editor, with Professor Chen Bo of Peking University, of a new book series, Contemporary Western Philosophy in Translation, published by Renmin University Press (Beijing); and she serves on the Editorial Boards of journals in Spain, Poland, Brazil, and Uruguay as well as in the U.S. and U.K..
Haack is an elected (British) delegate to the Institut International de Philosophie. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Peirce Edition Project (based at Indiana University), and of the Leverhulme Evidence Project (based at University College, London). From 1994-2004 she served as a member of the Advisory Board of the Shannon Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia; in 2005 she served on a panel writing the Fordham Foundation report on K-12 Science Standards across the United States. She is an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi, a past President of the Charles S. Peirce Society, and a past member of the U.S./U.K. Educational Commission.
Haack was awarded the Principal's Prize at St. Hilda's College in 1965, and held a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton in 1975-6. She has held several Orovitz summer awards from UM, and an NEH summer stipend. Haack has received Awards for Excellence in Teaching from the American Philosophical Association and from the University of Miami, where she has also received the Award for Outstanding Graduate Mentor, the Provost's Award for Research, and the Faculty Senate Distinguished Scholar Award.
Haack’s former graduate students now hold tenured, tenure-track, or other permanent positions at the University of Calgary; the University of Toronto; Wolfson College, Oxford; Vanderbilt University; Indiana University/Purdue University; the University of West Georgia; Georgia Tech; Virginia Tech; Florida International University; and the Tsing Hua National University of Taiwan.
In 2004 Haack was included in Peter J. King, 100 Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers (New York: Barron), which includes philosophers, from the East as well as the West, from Thales and Confucius to the present day; she is one of the handful of living philosophers so honored. In 2005 she was included in a list in the Sunday Independent (London) of the ten most important women philosophers of all time. (She prefers the less sexist tribute.) |
