Richard J. Bernstein is an American philosopher, the Vera List Professor of Philosophy and former dean of the graduate faculty at
The New SchoolThe New School is a university in New York City, located mostly in Greenwich Village. From its founding in 1919 by progressive New York academics, and for most of its history, the university was known as the New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University...
.
Bernstein grew up as part of a middle-class Jewish family in
Borough Park, BrooklynBorough Park , is a neighborhood in the southwestern part of the borough of Brooklyn, in New York City in the United States....
; his family moved to Long Island, New York following World War II. He received an A.B (1951) from the
University of ChicagoThe University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
, a B.S.
summa cum laude (1953) from
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, and his Ph.D. (1958) from
Yale UniversityYale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. He took a faculty position at Yale, but in 1965, the university denied him tenure despite the initial unanimous support of his department, leading to student protests and eventually to reforms of the tenure system at Yale. This event, now called the
Bernstein Affair, was “one of the most contested cases of tenure in the United States.” Bernstein then moved to a tenured position at
Haverford CollegeHaverford College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States, a suburb of Philadelphia...
, where he taught for 23 years and became the T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy before later moving to The New School. At The New School, the Richard J. Bernstein Endowed Prize Fellowship in Philosophy is awarded to distinguished philosophy students in his honor. In 1981, Bernstein became founding co-editor of
Praxis International, the revived journal of the Yugoslav
Praxis SchoolThe Praxis school was a Marxist humanist philosophical movement. It originated in Zagreb and Belgrade in the SFR Yugoslavia, during the 1960s.Prominent figures among the school's founders include Gajo Petrović and Milan Kangrga of Zagreb and Mihailo Marković of Belgrade...
philosophical movement. In 1988, he served as President of the
Metaphysical Society of AmericaThe Metaphysical Society of America is a philosophical organization founded by Paul Weiss in 1950 for promoting the study of metaphysics. The society is a member of the American Council of Learned Societies...
.
write:
External links