Richard Creath

Richard Creath (born December 15, 1947) is an American philosopher of science particularly known for his work on the logical empiricism and philosophy of language of Rudolf Carnap and Willard Van Orman Quine. He has been credited with introducing "conceptual engineering" to analytic philosophy.

Creath is emeritus President's Professor of philosophy and life sciences at Arizona State University and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been general editor for Rudolf Carnap's collected works and a board member of the Vienna Circle Institute.

Early life and education Creath was born December 15, 1947. He received a BA in philosophy from Knox College in 1969,

He completed his PhD under Wilfrid Sellars on the topic of Rudolf Carnap's philosophy of language, with a thesis titled Science, Syntax and Semantics: An Examination of the Philosophy of Language of Rudolf Carnap.

Career Creath became a professor of philosophy at Arizona State University (ASU) in 1974 and a professor of life sciences as well in 2003. He has directed ASU's History and Philosophy program since 2003, 2010–2013 he worked as an adjunct scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. and the issue of analytic propositions in their thinking. Though Carnap is now credited as a conceptual engineer, he only used the term "linguistic engineering."

Creath was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009 and chaired its division for the history and philosophy of science 2010–2011. Selected works

Books

Edited: Dear Carnap, Dear Van: The Quine-Carnap Correspondence and Related Work, University of California Press (1990). Edited: Biology and Epistemology. Co-edited with Jane Maienschein. Cambridge University Press (2000). Edited: The Cambridge Companion to Carnap. Co-edited with Michael Friedman. Cambridge University Press (2007). Edited: Carnap and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism, Springer (2012). General Editor: The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap, 14 volumes. Oxford University Press. Most volumes still forthcoming. Vol 1: Early Writings (2019). Vol 7: Studies in Semantics (2024).

Articles

“The Root of the Problem,” Linguistics and Philosophy (1977), 1:273–275. “Nominalism by Theft,” American Philosophical Quarterly (1980), 17:311–318. “Taking Theories Seriously,” Synthese (1985), 62: 317–345. “The Initial Reception of Carnap's Doctrine of Analyticity,” Nous (1987), 21: 477–499. “Every Dogma Has Its Day,” Erkenntnis (1991), 35: 347–389. “Carnap's Conventionalism,” Synthese (1992), 93:141–165. “Quine and the Limit Assumption in Peirce’s Theory of Truth,” Philosophical Studies (1998), 90:109–112. “The Role of History in Science,” Journal of the History of Biology (2010), 43:207–214. “The Logical and the Analytic,” Synthese (2016), 194(1): 79-96.

Chapters

“Carnap's Scientific Realism: Irenic or Ironic?” The Heritage of Logical Positivism, Nicholas Rescher, ed., University Press of America (1985), 117–131. “The Unimportance of Semantics” Science and Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Sahotra Sarkar, ed., Vol. 3, Logic, Probability, and Epistemology: The Power of Semantics, Garland Publishing (1996), 389–400. “Are Dinosaurs Extinct?” Machine Discovery. Jan M. Zytkow, ed., Kluwer (1997), 285–297. with Jane Maienschein, “Introduction,” Biology and Epistemology, Cambridge University Press (2000), ix–xviii. “Quine on the Intelligibility and Relevance of Analyticity,” The Cambridge Companion to Quine, Cambridge University Press (2004), 47–64. “(Anti-)Metaphysics in the Thirties: And Why Should Anyone Care Now?” Philosophy of Science in Europe: European Philosophy of Science and the Viennese Heritage'', Springer (2013), 67–76.