I'm a philosopher of logic, mathematics and language interested in incompleteness, anti-reductionism, pragmatism, notions like simplicity, aspect perception, computability and meaning, as well as political philosophy and aesthetics. I take an historical analytic approach to the interplay between logic and philosophy, I care about normative dimensions of truth, and I think Emerson, Thoreau, Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin and ordinary language philosophy have a lot to teach us about experience, ethics, gender, social relations, and what matters. I am lately thinking about philosophy of emerging media and how to sail on the deep seas of words in our lives.

Juliet Floyd

Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy

Boston University

Director, Center for the Humanities

Phone:

617-353-5546

Email:

jfloyd@bu.edu

Address:

745 Commonwealth Avenue

Boston, MA 02215

EXPERIENCE

1996-2005, 2006-

Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy

Director, Boston University Center for the Humanities

BOSTON UNIVERSITY

I joined the faculty in 1996 as an Associate Professor of Philosophy and was promoted to Full Professor in 2006. As of 2023 I am Director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities and Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy.

See https://www.bu.edu/humanities/ and http://www.bu.edu/philo/profiles/juliet-floyd/

1990-1996

Assistant Professor

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, GRADUATE CENTER

I became Assistant Executive Director of the Graduate Program in Philosophy.

1990-1996

Assistant Professor

CITY COLLEGE OF NEW YORK

I was Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy. I participated in a Mellon Grant to support underrepresented minorities to go on to PhD's in Philosophy.

EDUCATION

1982-1990

MA and PhD

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

I worked with Stanley Cavell, Burton Dreben, Warren Goldfarb, Charles Parsons, Hilary Putnam and Jack Rawls. My MA thesis was on the notion of the Sensus Communis in Kant's 3rd Critique. My dissertation was on Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics and rule-following.

1980-81

LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

My junior year I studied History and Philosophy of Science with Eli Zahar, John Watkins, John Worrall and Ernest Gellner. I became a rabid Feyerabendian about "method" and read everything Kuhn ever wrote, but I remained a serious student of Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam. This helped me resist the temptations of wooden views of concepts as "wholly internal" to theories.

1978-1980, 1980-1982

WELLESLEY COLLEGE

I wrote an honor's thesis with Ruth Anna Putnam on the theory of meaning and philosophy of mind: Putnam, Kripke, Lewis and Thomas Nagel. I was taught a great deal by Ifeanyi Menkiti, Owen Flanagan, Ken Winkler, Alasdair MacIntyre and, in the math department, by Donna Beers.

RECENT ACTIVITIES

Current Activities

BU MELLON SAWYER SEMINAR, 2016-2019

Humanities and Technology at the Crossroads: Where Do We Go From Here?

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation generously supported me and my colleagues James E. Katz (BU Division of Emerging Media) and Russell Powell (BU Philosophy) in running a series of faculty development seminars in Boston over three years.

Our idea was to develop new philosophy for thinking about everyday life in a computationally connected world. My belief is that the humanities are more foundational than ever: for computer science and mathematics, sociology and communication, and politics. We have continued to collaborate on projects. Now that I am Directing the BU Center for the Humanities, AI and philosophy remain themes for me.

Click on the title or poster to see our Website from the Mellon Sawyer Grant.

I published my book with Felix Mühlhölzer on Wittgenstein's Philosophy of the Real Numbers and another, shorter one on Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Math (Early, Middle and Later) in the Cambridge Elements Series in Philosophy of Mathematics (see below). I am currently writing a second Cambridge Element on Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy of Mathematics for the series on Wittgenstein's Philosophy. I am also publishing on philosophy of emerging media and ethics in a computational world, with two recent co-edited anthologies, some op-eds on AI, and a Special Issue of Philosophies co-edited with Sandra Laugier on the future of the concept of forms of life.

I lectured at the Einstein Forum in Berlin July 4-6, 2019 and gave the Vienna Circle Lecture July 25-27, 2019 at the meeting on Gödel's Legacy (https://kgs.logic.at/goedels-legacy/ and https://www.univie.ac.at/ivc/). I gave the Center for the Humanities Lecture in Criticism in October 2022 (https://www.bu.edu/lecturesincriticism/current-lecture-series/juliet-floyd/).

In July 2023 I became Director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities.

This has given me the opportunity to work with a great Humanities Faculty within a Global University that has a long legacy of outreach to the City of Boston and the World.

I also was named the Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, honoring one of the founders of Boston University's school of Boston Personalism, which inspired Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many many others in the pursuit of civil and human rights.

It seems to me that the Humanities will become ever more important in a world increasingly imbricated with AI and the automation of certain forms of human labor.

I keep track of speaking engagements on my CV, available below.

For current activities at the BU Center for the Humanities click on the logo below: