Aloysius Martinich

Aloysius Patrick Martinich (born June 28, 1946) is an American analytic philosopher and is the Roy Allison Vaughan Centennial Professor of Philosophy and Professor History at University of Texas at Austin.^[1][2] His area of interest is the nature and practice of interpretation; history of modern philosophy; the philosophy of language and religion and the history of political thought. He is considered a foremost authority on Thomas Hobbes.

Biography

Aloysius P. Martinich was born June 28, 1946 in Euclid General Hospital, Euclid, Ohio. He attended Catholic schools in the Cleveland area and graduated from St. Joseph High School in 1964. He graduated from the University of Windsor, Ontario in 1969 with a B.A. (First Honours), with a major in Honours Philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in December, 1972, with a dissertation, Reference and the Axiom of Existence, under the direction of Avrum Stroll. Later, he and Stroll co-authored the major article, “Epistemology,” in the Encyclopædia Britannica and the book, Much Ado about Non-Existence.

He became assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin in 1973, and eventually became Roy Allison Vaughan Centennial Professor in Philosophy. He is also professor of History and Professor of Government, through courtesy appointments. He has lectured at many universities in the United States, Europe, and China.

He has specialized in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. His book, The Philosophy of Language, has been the standard textbook in that subject since its first publication in 1985. For the sixth edition, he asked David Sosa to be his co-editor. The fourth edition of his book, Philosophical Writing is underway.

His book, The Two Gods of Leviathan (1992), argued for two main theses: that Hobbes was trying to reconcile traditional Christian doctrine with the new science of Copernicus and Galileo and that properly understood Christianity is not politically destabilizing. His biography Hobbes, which won the Robert W. Hamilton Prize, in 2000 is currently the standard one. He is the author or editor of many other books, and many articles.

He married Leslie Price in 1973. He has four children and many grandchildren.

Publications

Books

• Thomas Hobbes, Computatio sive Logica: Part One of De Corpore, translation and commentary, New York: Abaris Books, 1981.
• The Philosophy of Language (Critical Concepts in Philosophy), New York: Oxford University Press, 1985 (sixth edition edited with David Sosa, 2012).
• Philosophical Writing: An Introduction, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1989; second edition Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
• The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Thomas Hobbes Perspectives on British History, London: Macmillan, 1997.
• Hobbes: A Biography, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• A Companion to Analytic Philosophy, edited with David Sosa, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
• Leviathan: Parts I and II, Peterborough,Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002; revised edition with Brian Battiste, 2011.
• Hobbes (The Routledge Philosophers), New York: Routledge, 2005.
• Early Modern Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary, Malden: Blackwell Readings in the History of Philosophy, 2007.
• Much Ado About Nonexistence: Fiction and Reference (with Avrum Stroll), Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.

Notes

External links

• University of Texas at Austin, Faculty Profile Retrieved 23 July 2014.