Rogers Garland Albritton (August 15, 1923 – May 21, 2002) was an American philosopher who served as chair of the

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

and

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

philosophy departments. He published little (only five research papers during his lifetime) and inspired the entry "albritton" - a contraction of "all but written" - in the '' Philosophical Lexicon'' begun by

Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relat ...

(said entry having had its origins in a family joke). Albritton's specialties included ancient philosophy, philosophy of mind, free will, skepticism, metaphysics and the work of

Ludwig Wittgenstein Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considere ...

. Highly respected in his field, Philosopher

P. F. Strawson Peter Frederick Strawson (; 23 November 1919 – 13 February 2006) was an English philosopher. He was the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford (Magdalen College) from 1968 to 1987. Before that, he ...

once described Rogers as "one of the 10 best philosophers in the world.”

Hilary Putnam Hilary Whitehall Putnam (; July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions ...

, a past president of the American Philosophical Association and emeritus professor at Harvard recounted: “Many would agree, including myself. He was quite unique." Putnam goes on: “He gave me the feeling for what Socrates must have been like. Socrates didn’t publish much either. Like Socrates, he had a lot of impact on lots of philosophers.”

Biography

Albritton was born in

Columbus, Ohio Columbus () is the state capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Ohio. With a 2020 census population of 905,748, it is the 14th-most populous city in the U.S., the second-most populous city in the Midwest, after Chicago, and t ...

to Errett Cyril Albritton, a research physiologist, and Rietta Garland Albritton, a chemist. He was admitted to Swarthmore at the age of 15 but left to serve in the

Army Air Corps Army Air Corps may refer to the following army aviation corps: * Army Air Corps (United Kingdom), the army aviation element of the British Army * Philippine Army Air Corps (1935–1941) * United States Army Air Corps (1926–1942), or its p ...

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. He received his B.A. from

St. John's College, Annapolis St. John's College is a private liberal arts college with dual campuses in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. St. John's is one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States as the successor institution of Kin ...

in 1948. He taught for a year at St. John's and began teaching full-time at

Cornell Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

after completing 3 years of graduate work at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

. He received his Ph.D. from

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...

in 1955 and continued to teach at Cornell before being appointed to

in 1956. He made

tenure Tenure is a category of academic appointment existing in some countries. A tenured post is an indefinite academic appointment that can be terminated only for cause or under extraordinary circumstances, such as financial exigency or program disco ...

at Harvard in 1960 and served as chair from 1963 to 1970. In 1968, he was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

. In 1972, he transferred to

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

, where he served as chair from 1972 to 1981. In 1984 he was president of the Western (then Pacific) Division of the

American Philosophical Association The American Philosophical Association (APA) is the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States. Founded in 1900, its mission is to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarly ...

. He retired in 1991 but continued to teach courses at UCLA through the mid-1990s. Having suffered from chronic

emphysema Emphysema, or pulmonary emphysema, is a lower respiratory tract disease, characterised by air-filled spaces ( pneumatoses) in the lungs, that can vary in size and may be very large. The spaces are caused by the breakdown of the walls of the alve ...

, he died in 2002 of pneumonia. Of his limited publication rate, his ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' obituarist remarked:

"Dr. Albritton's penchant for always questioning a conclusion led him to avoid the permanency of the written word."

Research

Rogers was not generally interested in mainstream philosophy such as ethics and other topics dealing with social and political philosophy. His main focus was to shift his attention to knowledge, thought processes, and validity within such methods of obtaining knowledge or if the knowledge itself was valid. Albritton was especially interested in the main concept of being, time, space, etc. This led his decision to focus on

metaphysics Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...

and

epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...

. Freedom and free will were big staples of his philosophies. This shaped his philosophies and studies further into his life.

Freedom of will vs. freedom of action

Albritton's 1985 presidential address to the APA, "Freedom of Will and Freedom of Action," distinguished freedom of action (the freedom to do what we will) from freedom of the will itself. This was unusual, because

free will Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded. Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actio ...

had been identified with freedom of action by compatibilists since

Thomas Hobbes Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5/15 April 1588 – 4/14 December 1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influent ...

and

David Hume David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment philo ...

. "Where there's a will, there just isn't always a way," as he put it.

Works

“Forms of Particular Substances in Aristotle’s Metaphysics’,”
''

Journal of Philosophy ''The Journal of Philosophy'' is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal on philosophy, founded in 1904 at Columbia University. Its stated purpose is "To publish philosophical articles of current interest and encourage the interchange of ideas, e ...

'' 54 (1957): 699–707.
“Present Truth and Future Contingency,”
''

Philosophical Review ''The Philosophical Review'' is a quarterly journal of philosophy edited by the faculty of the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University and published by Duke University Press (since September 2006). Overview The journal publishes original ...

'' 66 (1957): 29–46.
“On Wittgenstein’s Use of the Term ‘Criterion’,”
''Journal of Philosophy'' 56 (1959): 845–56.
“Comments on Hilary Putnam’s ‘Robots: Machines or Artificially Created Life’,”
''Journal of Philosophy'' 61 (1964): 691–4.
"Freedom of Will and Freedom of Action,"
''

Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association The American Philosophical Association (APA) is the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States. Founded in 1900, its mission is to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarly ...

''. Vol. 59, No. 2 (Nov., 1985), pp. 239-251
“Comments on ‘Moore’s Paradox and Self–Knowledge’,”
''

Philosophical Studies ''Philosophical Studies'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal for philosophy in the analytic tradition. The journal is devoted to the publication of papers in exclusively analytic philosophy and welcomes papers applying formal techniques to philo ...

'' 77 (1995): 229–39.
"On a Form of Skeptical Argument from Possibility."
''

Philosophical Issues ''Philosophical Issues'' is an annual supplement to the journal ''Noûs'' published periodically, usually once per year. Each issue explores a specific area of philosophy through invited papers, critical studies, and book symposia. ''Philosophica ...

'' 21 (2011): 1-24.

References

External links

Rogers Albritton on Information Philosopher
{{DEFAULTSORT:Albritton, Rogers 1923 births 2002 deaths 20th-century American philosophers Cornell University faculty Deaths from pneumonia in California Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Harvard University faculty Princeton University alumni Swarthmore College alumni UCLA Philosophy University of California, Los Angeles faculty United States Army Air Forces personnel of World War II