Robert Stalnaker

Robert Culp Stalnaker (born January 22, 1940) is an American philosopher. He is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Stalnaker is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He earned his BA from Wesleyan University and his PhD from Princeton University in 1965, where Stuart Hampshire was his thesis advisor and Carl Hempel was a significant influence. Stalnaker taught at Yale University and the University of Illinois before joining the faculty at Cornell University for many years. He moved to MIT in 1988 and retired in 2016. His students include Jason Stanley and Delia Graff Fara. Stalnaker delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University in 2007 and the Casalegno Lectures at the University of Milan in 2017. His philosophical work spans semantics, pragmatics, philosophical logic, decision theory, game theory, conditionals, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, all aimed at understanding intentionality. He is a key figure in the development of possible world semantics, distinguishing his view from modal realism. His work on conditionals is considered foundational to conditional logic. Stalnaker's research on assertion as reducing the conversational common ground has been highly influential in semantics and pragmatics. He is the author of several books, including 'Context and Content' and 'Our Knowledge of the Internal World'.