Paul Boghossian

Paul Artin Boghossian (born 1957) is an American philosopher.

Boghossian earned his B.S. in physics at Trent University in 1976, and his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University in 1987.

In addition to his position at NYU, he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor from 1984 until 1992, and has also been a visiting professor at Princeton University.

He has held research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Magdalen College, Oxford, the University of London, and the Australian National University, and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

He is on the editorial board of the journals Philosophical Studies and Philosophers' Imprint.

He is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University, where he is chair of the department (having also held the position from 1994 to 2004).

His research interests include epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.

He is also director of the New York Institute of Philosophy and Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.

Boghossian is of Armenian ancestry.

As chair of the NYU philosophy department from 1994 to 2004, Boghossian built the NYU program into one of the top philosophy programs in the world.

In postmodern circles, Boghossian is known for his response to the Sokal hoax.

Boghossian also serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the World Knowledge Dialogue Foundation.

His book Fear of Knowledge won a Choice Award as an outstanding Academic Book of 2006.

In 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In his early work, Boghossian criticized naturalistic theories of content.

Much of his later work, including his book Fear of Knowledge, criticizes various forms of relativism, especially epistemic relativism, which claims that knowledge and reason are fundamentally cultural or subjective rather than objective.

In his article "Blind Reasoning", Boghossian argues that we are blind to our reasons for justifying our methods of inference (the epitome of a method of inference is taken to be modus ponens).

Rejecting both Simple Inferential Externalism for its inconsistency and Simple Inferential Internalism because it is difficult to accept, he opts for a third and new form of "rational insight".

This paper, in conjunction with an ongoing correspondence between Boghossian and Crispin Wright, is part of a project to defend against epistemic relativism.