Obituary Note: Jerry A. Fodor

Jerry A. Fodor, "one of the world's foremost philosophers of mind, who brought the workings of 20th-century computer technology to bear on ancient questions about the structure of human cognition," died November 29, the New York Times reported. He was 82. Fodor's work, begun in the 1960s and "dovetailing with linguistics, logic, semiotics, psychology, anthropology, computer science, artificial intelligence and other fields, is widely credited with having helped seed the emerging discipline of cognitive science."

"He basically created the field of philosophy of psychology," said Ernie Lepore, a colleague at Rutgers University and a frequent collaborator. "If the study of the mind has been dominant in the last 30 or 40 years of philosophy, it's really a function of Fodor's influence."

Fodor was the author of more than a dozen books, including The Modularity of Mind (1983); The Structure of Language (1964, with Jerrold J. Katz); The Language of Thought (1975); Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (1998); The Mind Doesn't Work That Way (2000); and What Darwin Got Wrong (2010, with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini).  

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