Barry Stroud

Academic career Stroud received a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1958. He was made a full professor there in 1974 and, from 1994, served as the Mills Professor of Metaphysics and Epistemology. Though officially retiring at the end of the 2015-2016 academic year, he continued his research, teaching and advising as a professor of the Graduate School. and spent a sabbatical year in Venice.

Over 1986–1987, as a visiting fellow of New College and All Souls College, Stroud gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University under the title 'The Quest for Reality.' and the Patrick Romanell Lecture in 2009. Stroud also delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of Buenos Aires in 1988. in 2014 to participate in the 16th ANPOF conference in Campos do Jordão,

Philosophical work Stroud's first book Hume (1977), which received positive reviews from R. F. Atkinson in Hume Studies and Donald W. Livingston amongst others, won the Matchette Prize in 1979. and, in 1999, by The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour. Stroud's Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value was published in 2011.

2011 would also see the publication of the first book-length critical treatment of Stroud's thought, The Possibility of Philosophical Understanding: Reflections on the Thought of Barry Stroud. It included essay contributions from Robert Fogelin, Ernest Sosa, John McDowell, Sarah Stroud and UC Berkeley colleague Hannah Ginsborg amongst others. Some of the central themes of his philosophical work are interpreted and elaborated upon in the volume editors' introduction to that work.

Several collections of Stroud's essays would also be published in his lifetime, the last of these appearing in 2018.

Death Having been diagnosed with advanced stage brain cancer just two months prior, Barry Stroud died on 9 August 2019.

Announcing his death, Berkeley Philosophy Department recorded that: His body of work, his influence on generations of students, his imprint on the character of our department, the example that he set of the purest philosophical inquiry — all of it is beyond reckoning. As hard as it is to imagine what philosophy at Berkeley will be like without him, it is even harder to imagine what it would have been.

Obituaries in the UC Berkeley News and The Daily Californian followed shortly after.

Works

Books

(1977) Hume (Arguments of the Philosophers) Routledge. . (1984) The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism. Oxford University Press.. (1999) The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour. Oxford University Press.. (2000) Understanding Human Knowledge: Philosophical Essays. Oxford University Press. . (2000) Meaning, Understanding, and Practice: Philosophical Essays. Oxford University Press. . (2011) Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value. Oxford University Press. . (2011) Philosophers Past and Present: Selected Essays. Oxford University Press. , (2018) Seeing, Knowing, Understanding: Philosophical Essays. Oxford University Press. ,

Select articles/chapters

(1965) Wittgenstein and Logical Necessity (1965). Reprinted in: A Priori Knowledge, 1987 (1968) Transcendental Arguments The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 65, No. 9 (May 2, 1968), pp. 241–256 (1980) Berkeley v. Locke on Primary Qualities Philosophy, Vol. 55, No. 212 (Apr., 1980), pp. 149–166 (1984) The Problem of the External World Chapter I of The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (1984) (1984) The Disappearing ‘We’, Jonathan Lear, Barry Stroud, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, Volume 58, Issue 1, 1 July 1984, pp. 219–258, (1984) G. E. Moore and Scepticism: ‘Internal’ and ‘External, Chapter III of The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (1985) An End to Anxiety: Review of four books on Wittgenstein, The London Review of Books 18 July 1985 (1987) XV—The Physical World, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 87, Issue 1, 1 June 1987, pp. 263–277 (1988) The Study of Human Nature and the Subjectivity of Value, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. (1994) Philosophical Scepticism, Ernest Sosa, Barry Stroud Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 68 (1994), pp. 263–307 (1996) The Charm of Naturalism, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 70 (2):43 - 55 (1996) (2008) Modes of philosophizing: A round table debate with Jonathan Barnes, Myles Burnyeat and Raymond Geuss, Eurozine, May 2008 (2011) Feelings and the Ascription of Feelings, Teorema, January 2011 pp. 25–33 (2016) Responses to Sceptical Essays Sképsis, , ANO VII, Nº 14, 2016, p. 218-233.

Full publications list: at UC Berkeley homepage.