Princeton - PWB 020998 - Professors accept endowed chairs

From the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, February 9, 1998

Professors accept endowed chairs

Five faculty members were named to endowed chairs at the January trustee meeting.

Paul Muldoon, professor in the Council of the Humanities and Creative Writing since 1995, and director of the Creative Writing Program since 1993, has been named Howard G.B. Clark '21 University Professor in the Humanities, as of July 1.

His New Selected Poems, 1968- 1994 won the 1997 Irish Literature Prize for Poetry sponsored by the Irish Times; a previous collection,The Annals of Chile, won the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize in 1995. Muldoon's eighth volume of poetry, Hay, will be published this year.

Muldoon joined the Princeton faculty in 1990.

Four faculty members in the Philosophy Department
were named to endowed chairs as of February 1.

Paul Benacerraf, Stuart Professor of Philosophy, has been named James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy. A member of the faculty since 1960, he was provost from 1988 to 1991. Named Stuart Professor in 1974, he has also served as associate dean of the Graduate School and associate provost.

Benacerraf studies the philosophy of mathematics, logic, epistemology and metaphysics, areas in which he teaches both undergraduate and graduate students. He is currently writing "a monograph whose main focus is on the implications of results in logic and foundations of mathematics for certain traditional philosophical positions," he says.

Professor John Cooper will become Stuart Professor of Philosophy. Visiting professor in 1980, Cooper joined the faculty as professor of philosophy in 1981 and chaired his department from 1984 to 1992.

A scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, with special focus on the moral and political theories of Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers, Cooper has taught Introduction to Ancient Philosophy and courses on Plato, Aristotle and Greek ethical theory for undergraduates, as well as seminars on Plato, Aristotle and Hellenistic philosophy for graduate students.

He is general editor of Plato: Complete Works (1997), and a book of his essays, Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory, is to be published this year.

David Lewis, a member of the faculty since 1970, has been Stuart Professor since 1995 and will become Class of 1943 University Professor of Philosophy. He has written widely on topics concerning the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, metaphysics and ethics.

In 1991 he won one of the University's Behrman Awards for distinguished achievement in the humanities. At Princeton, he teaches, among other courses, Introduction to Moral Philosophy, Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science.

Margaret Wilson, who joined the Princeton faculty as associate professor in 1970, has been named Stuart Professor of Philosophy. A scholar of 17th and 18th-century metaphysics and epistemology, she is author of Descartes (1978), and she prepared the entry on Descartes for the forthcoming "Encyclopedia of Cognitive Studies."

Wilson teaches courses in Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz; Philosophy of Religion; early modern philosophy; and graduate seminars in Descartes, Spinoza and other philosophers. She received the Behrman Award for distinguished achievement in the humanities in 1994.