Alvin I. Goldman *65

At the age of 85, Alvin died Aug. 4, 2024.

Alvin was born Oct. 1, 1938, in Brooklyn. He earned a B.A. from Columbia in 1960 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton in 1965, under the direction of Paul Benacerraf. His principal areas of interest were epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.

Alvin held positions at the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the University of Arizona before joining the Rutgers faculty in 1994. At Rutgers, he was named the Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science. He retired in 2018.

Alvin’s early book A Theory of Human Action was a revision of his Princeton dissertation and presents a systematic way of classifying and relating the many actions we perform at any time. His “naturalistic” approach to epistemology split individual epistemology into two parts: the analytic task of identifying the criteria, or satisfaction conditions, for various normative epistemic statuses; and the task where psychological science is required to identify the kinds of operations or computations available to the human cognizer, how well they work when operating on certain inputs and under certain conditions.

Alvin is survived by his wife, Holly Martin Smith.

Graduate alumni memorials are prepared by the APGA.