James Francis Ross (October 9, 1931 – July 12, 2010) was an American philosopher of religion, law, metaphysics and philosophy of mind. He was a member of the Philosophy Department at the University of Pennsylvania from 1962 until his death in 2010.
James Francis Ross
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| Born | (1931-10-09)October 9, 1931
Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.
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| Died | July 12, 2010(2010-07-12) (aged 78)
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
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| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Analytic Philosophy |
Main interests | Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Medieval Philosophy, Philosophy of Law |
Ross was born October 9, 1931, in Providence, Rhode Island, and died in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 12, 2010. He was son of the James Joseph and Teresa (Sullivan) Ross. His father was a pharmacist and his mother a school teacher. In 1956 he married Kathleen Fallon, a nurse from Providence, who died on May 23, 2010.
He received his A.B. (1953) and A.M. (1954) from Catholic University of America, Ph.D. (1958) from Brown University, and J.D. (1974) from the University of Pennsylvania. He was admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar in 1975. Ross began his academic career in the Philosophy Department at the University of Michigan initially as an instructor (1959–61) and then as an Assistant Professor (1961–62). In 1962 he joined the University of Pennsylvania and remained there until his death, as an assistant professor from 1962 to 1965, an associate professor from 1965 to 1968, and from 1968 onwards as a full professor. He held a number of visiting appointments including Visiting Lecturer Johns Hopkins (1964–65), the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) during the 1975–6 academic year, and Darwin College Cambridge University from September 1982 through December 1983. His research at the Institute for Advanced Study was supported by an NEH grant to the institute,.[1] He also led a 1977 NEH Summer Seminar at Brown University, titled Faith, Meaning and Religious Knowledge.[2] From 1984 to 1986 he was the president of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy.[3]
He researched, taught, and wrote in the fields of medieval philosophy, philosophy of language, law, and religion. In a career that spanned more than five decades, he produced more than 100 articles, a number of translations, and four books. In the last book published before he died, Thought and World (2008) he argues that meaning, truth, impossibility, natural necessity, and our intelligent perception of nature fit together into a distinctly realist account of thought and world. He articulates a moderate realism about repeatable natural structures and our abstractive ability to discern them that poses a challenge to many of the common assumptions and claims of contemporary analytic philosophy. He develops a broadly Aristotelian metaphysics that recognizes the "hidden necessities" of things, which are disclosed through the sciences.
James Ross' scholarly examination of Analogy began with his doctoral thesis at Brown University (1958), led to such seminal articles as "Analogy as a Rule of Meaning for Religious Language" (1961) and "Analogy and the Resolution of Some Cognitivity Problems" (1970), and eventually to a monograph, Portraying Analogy (1981), which was the first fundamental examination of the topic since Cajetan (Thomas Cajetan) in 1498.