Gerald J. Massey, Ph.D. (Princeton 1964), is Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, where he had also been Professor of History & Philosophy of Science and Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science before his retirement in May of 2007.  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 Scholar at the University of Louvain (Belgium) during 1956-57.  He served three years (1958-61) on active duty (field artillery) as a Lieutenant 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.  Apart from a semester as Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in 1967, he taught from 1963 to 1969 at Michigan State University, where he was promoted to Associate Professor 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 the 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 of the Department of Philosophy (1970-77), and 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 in the University of Pittsburgh’s newly formed HPS department.  He was appointed Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in 1992.  In 2005 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and a Visiting Professor at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey in 2006.

        During the 1970s Dr. Massey chaired several national committees 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 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 1988 to 1997 Dr. Massey served as Director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science, after having served as an Associate Director of this Center from 1985 to 1988.

        Dr. Massey is the author of Understanding Symbolic Logic (Harper & Row, 1970) and co-editor (with the late 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), 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 teach us about animals.  He and Dr. Barbara Massey served as guest editors of a special 1999 book-length issue of the journal Philosophical Topics devoted to philosophical ethology and zoological philosophy.  He has delivered lectures in universities and at conferences in Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

        In 1997 the President of Germany, Dr. Roman Herzog, awarded Dr. Massey the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1ster 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 succeeded in taking 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 this success to strong support of his anti-loyalty-oath stance from the press and from the media generally and to a ruling by the then Mercer County Solicitor, Mark Longietti, who declared the loyalty oath unconstitutional, exactly as Dr. Massey had argued.  Dr. Massey has vowed to fight for the removal of loyalty-oath legislation and other McCarthy-era statutes from the Pennsylvania code of laws.

         In addition to his ‘city residence’ in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, where he lives with his dogs Chico and Lazarus and his cat Zorro, Dr. Massey maintains a vacation cottage on his 70-acre horse farm in Stoneboro, Pennsylvania, where he makes hay and trains, studies, and rides Morgan horses.  Until recently, he served as an Auxiliary Deputy Sheriff with the Butler County Mounted Posse, a volunteer civic organization that conducts mounted patrols at large public events.  Poetry and sailing are among his passions, and some of his poems are posted on his webpage (www.pitt.edu/~gmas).  Although having retired from teaching in 2007, Dr. Massey continues to publish actively and to lecture widely in the United States and around the world.  Prominent among his recent publications are “A New Approach to the Logic of Discovery” in Theoria 2006, “St. Thomas Aquinas on the Age of the Universe: Pious Advocate or Self-Interested Partisan?” in Divinatio 2006, “A New Reconstruction of Zeno’s Flying Arrow” (with co-authors Milos Arsenijevic and Sandra Scepanovic) in Apeiron 2008, and “St. Thomas Aquinas on the Age of the Universe: Replies to Critics”, forthcoming in Divinatio 2009).