Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy; Director, Boston University Center for the Humanities

Website: https://www.julietfloyd.net/
Areas of Interest:
History and Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics, Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, History of Early Analytic Philosophy, Wittgenstein, Kant, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Emerging Media.

Click here to view a copy of Dr. Floyd’s CV.

Professor Floyd joined the faculty at Boston University from the City College of New York and C.U.N.Y. (1990-1994), where she served as Associate Director of the Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center (1993-4). She is especially known for her work on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of logic and mathematics (Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics, Cambridge Element 2021, Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Hardy’s Course of Pure Mathematics: A Non-Extensionalist Account of the Real Numbers (with Felix Mühlhölzer, Springer 2020) and the philosophy of Alan Turing (Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing: Turing 100 (co-edited with A. Bokulich, Springer, 2017).  She has written over eighty articles about such issues as the nature and limitations of philosophical and axiomatic methods, simplicity and modernism in mathematics and the arts, skepticism and rule-following, culture and forms of life, opacity in AI and the concepts of “rigor” and the “everyday”, ordinary language philosophy and ethics, and the history of American philosophy, including pragmatism (James, Vienna Circle, Carnap, Quine, Putnam, Rawls, Cavell).  She has co-edited Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy (with S. Shieh, Oxford University Press, 2001), Philosophy of Emerging Media: Understanding, Appreciation, Application (with J.E. Katz, Oxford University Press 2016), and Perceiving the Future Through New Communication Technology and Nudging Choices Through Media: Ethical and Philosophical Implications for Humanity (with J.E. Katz and K. Shiepers, Palgrave Macmillan 2021 and 2023).

Professor Floyd has received fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies, the Fulbright Association, MIT’s Dibner Institute for the History of Science, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Lichtenberg Kolleg, Göttingen.  This has enabled her to further the study of 20th century analytic philosophy in an international context, and she lectures widely.  She has held Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Vienna, Paris (I, Panthéon-Sorbonne), and Bordeaux (Michel de Montaigne). In 2016-19 she was awarded a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Grant for faculty development (with James E. Katz and Rachell Powell) to research philosophies of emerging computational technologies and the ways they are transforming social, ethical, and philosophical aspects of everyday life (https://www.mellonphilemerge.com/,  https://www.demoseries.eu/ and https://icultural.blogs.uv.es/). She co-directed in 2019 The Mentoring Project For Pre-tenure Women Faculty in Philosophy (https://marcsandersfoundation.org/the-mentoring-workshop/).