Allan Gotthelf

Academic career[edit]

Allan Stanley Gotthelf was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 30, 1942.^[2] He received a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Brooklyn College in 1963 and a Master of Arts in mathematics from Pennsylvania State University in 1964. He then received a Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy from Columbia University in 1972 and 1975, respectively, where he studied under professors such as Aristotelian scholar John Herman Randall, Jr.^[2] An essay based on his doctoral dissertation (both titled Aristotle's Conception of Final Causality) won first prize in the Dissertation Essay Competition of The Review of Metaphysics and was published in that journal in December 1976. He began his teaching career at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.


He was an emeritus professor of philosophy at The College of New Jersey, a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and visiting professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he held the university's Fellowship for the Study of Objectivism from 2003 to 2012.^[2] He was one of the founders of the Ayn Rand Society (founded in 1987), affiliated with the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, and held the position of secretary of the Society and chairman of its steering committee from 1990 until his death.^[3]


Gotthelf published many articles and reviews in ancient philosophy and science, especially on the philosophical significance of Aristotle's scientific methodology and biology.^[2]


In the 1980s, he co-organized numerous international conferences on Aristotle's biological and philosophical thought, including the 1988 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Biology, and Ethics (with Michael Frede and John Cooper). He edited the Festschrift in honor of David M. Balme, Aristotle on Nature and Living Things^[4] and co-edited (with James G. Lennox) Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Gotthelf prepared for publication D. M. Balme's posthumous editions of Aristotle's History of Animals (HA): (a) the Loeb edition of Books VII–X (Harvard University Press, 1991) and (b) the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries edition of the whole of HA (Cambridge University Press, vol. 1: 2002, vol. 2: forthcoming).


Gotthelf received many honors for his work on Aristotle, including in 2004 an international conference on "Aristotle on Being, Nature, and Life", held "in celebration of his contributions to the study of classical philosophy and science"; a volume of the proceedings, Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf, edited by James G. Lennox and Robert Bolton, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. A volume of Gotthelf's collected Aristotle papers (including four papers previously unpublished), Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle's Biology, was published by Oxford University Press in their Oxford Aristotle Studies series in early 2012.


At the University of Pittsburgh, he taught graduate courses on Aristotle and organized various workshops and conferences on the nature of concepts and objectivity and the bearing of these issues on important topics in epistemology, philosophy of science, and metaethics, including those on Aristotle and Ayn Rand's epistemology.^[2](See also, in the next section below, his role as editor of the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series.)


He joined the department of philosophy at Rutgers University as the Anthem Foundation Distinguished Fellow in the fall of 2012, where he taught until his death from cancer on August 30, 2013.^[5]