Delia Graff Fara

Delia Ruby Graff Fara (April 28, 1969 – July 18, 2017) was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at Princeton University. Her academic career spanned the fields of philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophical logic. Fara was particularly recognized for her significant contributions to the problem of vagueness, where she championed an interest-relative theory of contextualism. Her seminal article, "Shifting Sands: An Interest-Relative Theory of Vagueness," posited that the meanings of vague expressions make the truth conditions of sentences containing them sensitive to the speaker's interests. She argued that as a speaker's interests evolve, so too can the extension of a vague term. Fara completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard University in 1991 and earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997, under the guidance of George Boolos and Robert Stalnaker. She began her academic career at Princeton University in 1997, moved to Cornell University in 2001, and returned to Princeton in 2005, where she held a tenured position. She passed away in July 2017 at the age of 48.