Roderick Firth (January 30, 1917 – December 22, 1987)
Education
Firth earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1943. His thesis was entitled Sense-Data and the Principle of Reduction.
Career
He taught at Brown University before joining the Harvard faculty in 1953.[
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Firth is noted for his defense of the ideal observer theory in ethics[1964 Journal of Philosophy 61 (19):545-557.] Firth also defended a form of semantic holism which he referred to as a "coherence theory of concepts" distinct from both the coherence theory of truth and coherence theory of justification.[Firth, R. (1964). Coherence, Certainty, and Epistemic Priority. The Journal of Philosophy, 61(19), 545-557.] Firth debated his views on the nature of concept formation and epistemic privilege with Wilfrid Sellars against whom he defended the views of C. I. Lewis.[Sellars, W. (1981). Foundations for a metaphysics of pure process: The Carus lectures of Wilfrid Sellars. The Monist, 64(1).][Firth, R. (1981). Reply to Sellars. The Monist, 64(1), 91-101.]
See also
