James Higginbotham

James Higginbotham
James Higginbotham
Born	17 August 1941; Chattanooga, Tennessee
Died	25 April 2014 (aged 72); Los Angeles, California
Alma mater	Columbia University
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Philosophy of language, logic, linguistics

James Higginbotham FBA (17 August 1941 – 25 April 2014) was a distinguished professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He taught previously at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and at the University of Oxford as a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.

Education and career

Higginbotham earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University in 1973^[1] under the supervision of Sidney Morgenbesser and Charles Parsons. He taught at Columbia until 1980, when he moved to MIT as associate professor of philosophy and linguistics. In 1993, he became Professor of General Linguistics at Oxford University, a position he held until moving to University of Southern California in 2000.^[2]

He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995 and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2011.^[3]

Higginbotham edited the Journal of Philosophy (along with others) when he was on the faculty at Columbia University. He was also the editor of the OUP series in cognitive science and the associate editor of Pragmatics and Cognition.

Professor Higginbotham published many articles in MIT working papers in linguistics, Linguistic Inquiry, Mind & Language, Linguistics & Philosophy, etc.
He authored volumes published by Oxford University Press, Routledge, and he edited a volume on the semantics of events published by OUP.