News & Events MIT Philosopher Richard Holton to Lecture at Amherst College April 2

March 12, 2009                
               
AMHERST, Mass.—Richard Holton, professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give a talk titled “Willing, Wanting, Waiting” at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 2, in Pruyne Lecture Hall of Amherst College’s Fayerweather Hall. Organized by the college’s Department of Philosophy and funded by the Forry and Micken Fund in Philosophy and Science, the lecture is free and open to the public.

Holton arrived at MIT in the fall of 2004. He graduated from University College at Oxford University in 1984 and was a graduate student at Oxford’s Nuffield College and the École Normale Superieure in Paris before starting a Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University. He went on to teach at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia; was a research fellow in the philosophy program of Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences; and then taught at Sheffield University and the University of Edinburgh.

Holton’s doctoral dissertation was in the philosophy of language, and he continues to work in that area. He is currently working mainly in moral psychology, ethics and the philosophy of law.

The Forry and Micken Fund in Philosophy and Science was established in 1983 by Carol Micken and John I. Forry ’66 to promote the study of philosophical issues arising out of new developments in the sciences, including mathematics, and issues in the philosophy and history of science.