Background
Marcus, Ruth Barcan was born in 1921 in New York City.
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Ruth Barcan Marcus
Edit ProfileEducation
New York University, BA 1941. Yale University, Manuscripts and Archives 1942, PhD 1946. Infla: Rudolf Carnap, Ernst Cassirer, A. N. Prior and W. V. O. Quine.
Career
Research Associate in Anthropology, Institute for Human Relations, Yale University, 1945-1947. AAUW Fellow 1947-1948. Visiting Professor, Northwestern University, 1950 7.
Guggenheim Fellow, 1953-1954. Assistant, then Associate Professor, Roosevelt University, Chicago, 1957-1963. Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1964-1970, Head of Department, 1963-1969.
Fellow. University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study, 1968-1969. Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University, 1970-1973. Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Philosophy, Yale University, from 1973.
Fellow, Centre for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, Stanford University, California, 1979. Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, University of Edinburgh, 1983. Visiting Fellow, Wolfson College, Oxford, 1985, 1986: Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall.
Cambridge, 1988; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Views
Ruth Marcus made major contributions to the development of modal logic. Some of the best known modal systems had already been axiontatised by C. I. Lewis in 1918, but it was Marcus who extended them by providing modal predicate logic. She also favoured what is known as ‘substitutional’ quantification over ‘objectual quantification, regarding the former as helping to resolve certain problems arising from mixing quantifiers with modal operators and with verbs of attitude like ‘believes’. Controversially, she maintained that extensionality in logic was a matter of degree. Some ten years ahead of Saul Kripke she put forward the theorem to the effect that all genuine identity statements, if true, were necessarily truc. She also anticipated later work on the notion ot direct reference, treating proper names as ‘tags, as not as equivalent in meaning to descriptions. Additionally, she originated the thesis which now bears her name—the ‘Barcan formula’ which, informally, states that if it is possible that there is an object with a given property, then it follows that there is an object which possibly has that property. A feature of these theses, which attracted much discussion, is their prima fac*e commitment to essentialism, that is to say the view that entities have at least some of their properties of necessity. Years later, evincing a freshness of response to some of the developments she had helped to stimulate, she recommended substitutional quantification as the most appropriate for the nc" ‘Meinongian’ logics which had been deve - oped by Terence Parsons and others. Throughout, however, her most distinguished opponent has been W. V. O. Quine, who remained convinced tha modality and essentialism were suspect and ha no place in any scientific account of the wori - Not even Ruth Marcus escaped the charge tn modal logic had been conceived in the sin confusing use and mention, but Quine huns would be the first to acknowledge the significance and calibre of the work of this sometimes neglected philosophical logician.
