Alexander Rosenberg

Alexander Rosenberg (born 1946) is an American philosopher, and the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He is also a novelist.

Rosenberg attended the City College of New York where he graduated with a B.A. in 1967. He received his Ph.D from the Johns Hopkins University in 1971. He won the Lakatos Award in 1993 and was the National Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Lecturer in 2006.

Rosenberg is an atheist. He describes himself as a Scientistic naturalist.

Rosenberg's early work focused on the philosophy of social science and especially the philosophy of economics. His doctoral dissertation, published as Microeconomic Laws in 1976, was the first treatment of the nature of economics by a contemporary philosopher of science. Over the period of the next decade he became increasingly skeptical about neoclassical economics as an empirical theory.

He later shifted to work on issues in the philosophy of science that are raised by biology. He became especially interested in the relationship between molecular biology and other parts of biology. Rosenberg introduced the concept of supervenience to the treatment of intertheoretical relations in biology, soon after Donald Davidson began to exploit Richard Hare's notion in the philosophy of psychology. Rosenberg is among the few biologists and fewer philosophers of science who reject the consensus view that combines physicalism with antireductionism (see his 2010 on-line debate with John Dupré at Philosophy TV).

Rosenberg also coauthored an influential book on David Hume with Tom Beauchamp, Hume and the Problem of Causation, arguing that Hume was not a skeptic about induction but an opponent of rationalist theories of inductive inference.

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