Barry Stroud, influential, independent-minded philosopher, dies at 84
Barry Stroud, an influential thinker who challenged the prevailing attitudes of mid-20th century philosophy and sought to understand enduring and inescapable questions about knowledge, perception and reality, died of brain cancer at his home in Berkeley on Aug. He was 84. The Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and mentor to generations of scholars, Stroud joined the university's faculty in 1961, after earning a Ph.D. from Harvard, and continued to teach and write even after his retirement in 2016. While best known for his work in epistemology and philosophical skepticism - as well as his writings on such philosophers as David Hume and Ludwig Wittgenstein - Stroud's overarching legacy, his colleagues say, was his ability to see the big picture and get to the heart of philosophy. "Barry Stroud was a philosopher's philosopher," said Niko Kolodny, chair of philosophy at UC Berkeley. "He had a profound and far-reaching influence on generations of philosophers - above all, for his view of what philosophy itself was.
