Biography

Provost on September 1, 2000. He has been a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy since 1983 after receiving his doctorate at Stanford in 1982. He is also a faculty member of the Symbolic Systems Program and a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information.

Etchemendy, whose research interests include logic, semantics and the philosophy of language, has challenged orthodox views on the central notions of truth, logical consequence and logical truth. His recent work has focused on the role of diagrams and other nonlinguistic forms of representation in reasoning. His latest books are Language, Proof and Logic (1999) and Hyperproof (1994), both written with the late Jon Barwise. He and Barwise also developed the academic software "Turing's World" and "Tarski's World," as well as the "Hyperproof" software that allows computers to support the human reasoning process.

An exceptionally popular teacher, Etchemendy won the Bing Teaching Award in 1992, the first year it was presented. He was cited for "the most extraordinarily positive testimony from students."

Etchemendy served as senior associate dean in the School of Humanities and Sciences from 1993 to 1997. He was director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information prior to that. He was deputy chair of the search committee that nominated John Hennessy to be Stanford's 10th president. He also chaired the Commission on Technology in Teaching and Learning that President Gerhard Casper established to explore ways to enhance traditional teaching methods through technology. Etchemendy served on the advisory board of the Academic Council in 1998-99, and has been a freshman adviser.

Etchemendy was born in Reno, Nev., and earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Nevada, Reno. He was a lecturer at Princeton University from 1981 to 1982 and an assistant professor there from 1982 to 1983.

He is a member of the American Philosophical Association, on the governing council of the Association for Symbolic Logic, an editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic, and on the editorial boards of Synthese and Philosophia Mathematica.