The American Academy of Arts & Sciences will announce its newly elected Fellows in the next few weeks. The AAAS exists to recognize distinguished achievement in the arts and sciences (and a few other non-academic arenas), though its elections frequently display an unnerving amount of nepotism and institutional bias. (A current membership list is here. Note that Philosophy is lumped in with Theology.)
If the process is at all based on merit, though, then at least some of the following philosophers had better be elected this year. There are other meritorious philosophers, to be sure, but these folks are at least as senior and accomplished as many already elected in philosophy:
Nuel Belnap (University of Pittsburgh)
Arthur Fine (University of Washington)
Kit Fine (New York University)
Clark Glymour (Carnegie-Mellon University)
Alvin Goldman (Rutgers University)
Gilbert Harman (Princeton University)
Larry Laudan (UNAM)
Peter Railton (University of Michigan)
Stephen Stich (Rutgers University)
Crispin Wright (University of St. Andrews and New York University)
Tune in in about three weeks, and we'll see how many of these ten make it this year. (The AAAS will elect 4-5 philosophers each year, and my guess is all of these accomplished philosophers will get the recognition they deserve over time...but the time has come, so the AAAS had better get started!)
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