Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (1932–2020)

Amélie Oksenberg was born to a Polish Jewish family living in Belgium. They emigrated to the USA, and she earned degrees at the University of Chicago, Princeton, and Yale. In 1954, she married Richard Rorty, also a philosophy graduate student, with whom she had a son; the couple divorced in 1972. Amélie Rorty began her academic career at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and then taught at Douglass College of Rutgers University from 1962 to 1988, when she was named Distinguished Professor. She was professor and director of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University from 1995 to 2003, and a visiting professor at Boston University and Tufts University. Most of her work has been in the history of moral and civic psychology, informed by the ideas of Aristotle, Spinoza and Hume, and has also taught courses on philosophic themes in literature and art. She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and the author or editor of more than a dozen collections of essays. She edited and contributed to Explaining Emotions (1980), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (1980), and co-edited Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (1992) with Martha Nussbaum. She initiated and served as General Editor of the Modern Studies in Philosophy series from Doubleday-Anchor and of the Major Thinkers series from the University of California Press.