Allan Gotthelf - Academic Career

Academic Career

Gotthelf received his masters degree in mathematics from Pennsylvania State University, and his masters and PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 1975, where he studied under professors such as the noted Aristotelian scholar John Herman Randall, Jr. An essay based on his doctoral dissertation (both titled Aristotle's Conception of Final Causality) won first prize in the Dissertation Essay Competition of The Review of Metaphysics and was published in that journal in December 1976. He began his teaching career at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

He is an emeritus professor of philosophy at The College of New Jersey, a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and visiting professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has held the university's Fellowship for the Study of Objectivism since 2003. He was one of the founders of the Ayn Rand Society (founded in 1987), affiliated with the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, and has held the position of secretary of the Society and chairman of its Steering Committee since 1990.

Gotthelf has published many articles and reviews in ancient philosophy and science, especially on the philosophical significance of Aristotle's scientific methodology and biology.

In the 1980s, he co-organized numerous international conferences on Aristotle's biological and philosophical thought, including the 1988 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Biology, and Ethics (with Michael Frede and John Cooper). He edited the Festschrift in honor of David M. Balme, Aristotle on Nature and Living Things and co-edited (with James G. Lennox) Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Gotthelf has prepared for publication D.M. Balme's posthumous editions of Aristotle's History of Animals (HA): (a) the Loeb edition of Books VII-X (Harvard University Press, 1991) and (b) the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries edition of the whole of HA (Cambridge University Press, vol. 1: 2002, vol. 2: forthcoming).

Gotthelf has received many honors for his work on Aristotle, including in 2004 an international conference on "Aristotle on Being, Nature, and Life", held "in celebration of his contributions to the study of classical philosophy and science"; a volume of the proceedings, Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf, edited by James G. Lennox and Robert Bolton, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. A volume of Gotthelf's collected Aristotle papers (including four papers previously unpublished), Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle's Biology, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in their prestigious Oxford Aristotle Studies series, in early 2012.

At the University of Pittsburgh, he has taught graduate courses on Aristotle and organized various workshops and conferences on the nature of concepts and objectivity and the bearing of these issues on important topics in epistemology, philosophy of science, and metaethics, including those on Aristotle and Ayn Rand's epistemology.(See also, in the next section below, his role as editor of the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series.)

Most recently, he joined the department of philosophy at Rutgers University as the Anthem Foundation Distinguished Fellow in the fall of 2012, where he currently still teaches.