Max Hocutt
- Phone: (205) 339-9514
- Email: mhocutt@comcast.net
- CV
Born in Tuscaloosa 1936 and raised in Mobile, I worked my way through college selling shoes and driving nails, graduated with honors from Tulane University in 1957, and took the PhD from Yale University in 1960 with a dissertation on Charles Peirce.
Keeping a promise to the Southern Fellowships Fund to pursue a career of college teaching in the south, I taught at the newly opened University of South Florida for five years before coming to the University of Alabama in 1965, from which I retired in 2001. I was a visiting fellow at Oxford University in 1971, at Princeton University in 1978, and at St. Andrews University in 1987.
For the first twenty years of my career, I wrote mainly on philosophy of mind and psychology, publishing in 1967 the first paper to distinguish type from token identities and, a little later, a defense of B.F. Skinner’s concept of stimulus; but during that same period I also published essays on Aristotle, free will, perception, epistemic logic, the evaluation of teaching, and other topics. From 1978 to 1992, I served as chairman of the Department and for half of that time as editor of Behavior and Philosophy, a publication of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. Early in my chairmanship, I published two textbooks, First Philosophy and The Elements of Logical Analysis and Inference.
After retiring from the chairmanship, I concentrated on developing an empiricist theory of normative judgments and published a book on the topic in 2000. Since retiring, I have contributed several pieces on behaviorism to various encyclopedias, written over a dozen reviews of books in psychology, and published several essays, some on multiculturalism and truth, others on the political philosophies of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, and Cass Sunstein. My biography appears in Who’s Who in America. I am one of two philosophers (the other is Quine) mentioned in B.F. Skinner’s autobiography.