Faculty • Department of Philosophy at Boston University

Juliet Floyd
Professor of Philosophy
Office: STH 503
E-mail: jfloyd@bu.edu
Education: Ph.D., Harvard University, B.A., Wellesley College
Interests: History and Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics, Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, History of Early Analytic Philosophy, Wittgenstein, Kant, Aesthetics
Click here for a copy of her c.v.

After studying History and Philosophy of Science at Wellesley and the London School of Economics Professor Floyd received her PhD. from Harvard in 1990. Before coming to Boston University in 1996 she taught at the City College of New York and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she also served as Deputy Executive Director of the Graduate Program in Philosophy. She was appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna in the spring of 2007, where she taught Wittgenstein and philosophy of language.

Professor Floyd has received several fellowships and awards, among them grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Association, the Dibner Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science at MIT, the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the C.U.N.Y. Research Foundation, and Wellesley College.

Her research focuses on the history of twentieth century philosophy, including its relations to eighteenth century philosophy, especially on topics in epistemology and the philosophy of logic and mathematics. She would like to see the history of efforts to formalize rationality and meaning placed front and center in the context of twentieth century intellectual history, a history to which she believes historians of analytic philosophy can contribute. Her writings have examined the interplay between logic, mathematics and philosophy in figures such as Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Gödel and Quine. She has also written articles on the objectivity and nature of rule-following, on the fate of empiricism in the1950s, and on the historical significance of attempts at the mathematical rigorization of intuitive notions such as meaning, truth, proof, reference and algorithm. She has a longstanding interest in the role of skepticism in philosophy: how it functions, from whence it arises, and how it may be investigated in aesthetics, in moral and political philosophy, and in philosophy of language.

Professor Floyd is the author of many articles. She co-edited (with S. Shieh) Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2001; on line version 2004). She is currently working on a manuscript treating the impact on Wittgenstein in the mid-1930s of Turing’s and Gödel’s undecidability and incompleteness results. Click here or a copy of her c.v.