Brief Academic Vita
GERALD J. MASSEY, Ph.D.

           Gerald J. Massey, Ph.D. (Princeton 1964), is Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy, Professor of History & Philosophy of Science, and Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He took a B.A. degree maxima cum laude (1956) and an M.A. degree (1960) in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.  Appointed a Danforth Fellow and Woodrow Wilson Fellow (hon.) in 1956, he studied as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Louvain (Belgium) during 1956-57.  He served three years (1958-61) on active duty as a lieutenant in field artillery in the United States Marine Corps, from which he was honorably discharged at the rank of Captain in 1971.  He took M.A. (1962) and Ph.D. (1964) degrees in philosophy at Princeton University, where Carl G. Hempel directed his dissertation and Alonzo Church served as First Reader.  During 1962-63 he served as an Editorial Assistant to Alonzo Church, the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Symbolic Logic.  Apart from a visiting semester at the University of Michigan in 1967, Dr. Massey taught from 1963 to 1969 at Michigan State University, where he was promoted to Associate Professor of Philosophy in 1966 and then to Professor of Philosophy in 1968.  From 1963 to 1970 he served as Managing Editor of the journal Philosophy of Science, and from 1964 to 1970 as Secretary-Treasurer of the Philosophy of Science Association.  He spent 1969-70 as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh.

     In 1970 Dr. Massey was appointed Professor of Philosophy, Chairman (1970-77) of the Department of Philosophy, and Senior Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.  In 1971 he was also appointed Professor of History & Philosophy of Science.  He was named Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in 1992.

     During the 1970s Dr. Massey chaired several national committees (Ad Hoc Committee on Unionization and Collective Bargaining; Committee on Career Opportunities) of the American Philosophical Association and served on its Board of Officers from 1973 to 1978.  He served as President of the University of Pittsburgh's Faculty Senate in 1976-77.  He spent the winter 1982 semester as Visiting Truax Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College.  On special short-term assignment as Associate Dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences in 1984, he drew up the long-range plan for this unit.  From 1985 to 1988 he served as an Associate Director of Pitt's Center for Philosophy of Science and then as the Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science from 1988 to 1997.

     Dr. Massey is the author of Understanding Symbolic Logic (Harper & Row, 1970) and co-editor (with Tamara Horowitz) of Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), co-editor (with John Earman, Allen Janis, and Nicholas Rescher) of Philosophical Problems of the Internal and External Worlds (University of Pittsburgh Press & University of Konstanz Press, 1993), and co-editor (with Martin Carrier and Laura Ruetsche) of Science at Century's End: Philosophical Questions on the Progress and Limits of Science (University of Pittsburgh Press & University of Konstanz Press, 2000), and the author of many essays and articles in mathematical logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and the history of philosophy.  In recent years he has been working to establish a new approach to philosophy, the zoological approach, which takes into account what science and experience have taught us about animals.  He and Dr. Barbara Massey served as guest editors of a special 1999 book-length issue of the journal Philosophical Topics, which is devoted to philosophical ethology and zoological philosophy.  He has delivered lectures in many universities and conferences in North America, South America, Europe, Turkey, and Israel.

     In 1997 the President of Germany, Dr. Roman Herzog, awarded Dr. Massey the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1ste Klasse (Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany) for his contributions to German-American academic and philosophical cooperation.
   In November 2005, Dr. Massey was elected to public office as a write-in candidate for a seat on the Borough Council of Stoneboro, Pennsylvania.  He managed to take his seat on this Council in January 2006 despite his refusal to sign a McCarthy-era "anti-subversive" loyalty oath required of all elected local officials in Pennsylvania.  He credits his being able to take his seat as Councilor to strong support of his anti-loyalty-oath stance in the press and in the media generally and to a crucial ruling by Mercer County Solicitor Mark Longietti who declared the loyalty oath unconstitutional and unenforceable. Dr. Massey has vowed to fight for the removal of all loyalty-oath legislation and other McCarthy-era statutes from the Pennsylvania Code.

     Dr. Massey divides his living between his 70-acre horse farm in Stoneboro, Pennsylvania, where he grows hay and trains, studies, and rides Morgan horses, and his town home in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania.  An Auxiliary Deputy Sheriff, he can sometimes be found patrolling large public gatherings with the Butler County Mounted Posse.  Poetry and sailing are among his passions, and some of his poems are posted on this webpage.

     Dr. Massey will formally retire from the University of Pittsburgh on April 30, 2007, but he assures his colleagues and friends around the world that although he is retiring from teaching, he is retiring neither from the pursuit of philosophical truth nor from his many other interests.  As Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Dr. Massey intends to be as intellectually active as he has ever been.  As confirmation thereof, he points to his two most recent publications: “A New Approach to the Logic of Discovery”, Theoria, vol. 48 (2005), pp. 73-93 (this is a Serbian version; the English original will soon be published in the same journal), and “St. Thomas Aquinas on the Age of the Universe: Pious Advocate or Self-Interested Partisan?”, Divinatio: Studia Culturologica, vol. 24 (2006), pp. 1-32.