The Department of Philosophy announces the retirement of Professor Graeme Forbes as of May 31, 2020.
Professor Forbes is widely regarded as one of the most prominent recent analytic philosophers working in metaphysics and philosophy of language. He earned his D.Phil. in Philosophy from Oxford in 1980, writing a thesis under the direction of Christopher Peacocke (his genealogy by supervisor: Peacocke, Dummett, Anscombe, Wittgenstein, Ramsey, Russell). He spent much of his career at Tulane University, where he was Celia Scott Weatherhead Distinguished Professor, before coming to CU in 2006. He is the author of three monographs, The Metaphysics of Modality (Oxford 1985), Languages of Possibility (Basil Blackwell 1989), and Attitude Problems (Oxford 2006), as well as a widely used and highly praised textbook in logic, Modern Logic (Oxford 1994). Forbes is also the author of 34 refereed papers to date, nearly all of which appeared in journals widely regarded as among the top in the field; and he has written 42 invited papers that have appeared in edited collections. 15 of his papers have been republished in other collections, often in translation. Professor Forbes regularly taught PHIL 2440, Symbolic Logic, as well as more advanced courses in philosophical and modal logic, and has supervised numerous graduate students. For 7 years he was philosophy editor-in-chief for the journal Linguistics and Philosophy. In 2017 he was awarded the Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarly and Creative Work.
The Department thanks Professor Forbes for his contributions to our teaching and research mission, his service and dedication to our department, and wishes him the very best. We will miss you Graeme!