Jerry Fodor, the State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, emeritus, at Rutgers University, died Nov. 29, 2017, after a long illness. He was 82.
Fodor graduated from Columbia University in 1956 and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton in 1960. He then taught at MIT from 1959 to 1986 and at the CUNY Graduate Center from 1986 to 1988. From 1988 until retiring in 2012, he taught at Rutgers and founded the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science.
His bylined obituary in The New York Times stated that he was “one of the world’s foremost philosophers of mind who brought the workings of 20th-century computer techniques to bear on ancient questions about the structure of human cognition.”
Of his more than a dozen books, several were meant for the general reader. He co-authored What Darwin Got Wrong, an example of his fearless willingness to disagree with accepted beliefs when his research showed otherwise.
Fodor is survived by his wife, Janet, a distinguished professor of linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center, and their daughter. He is also survived by a son from his first marriage to Iris Goldstein, an emerita professor of applied psychology at New York University.
Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.