Behind the CV. Reflections on Larry Laudan's Unconventional Academic Career

• Pages: 11-24
• Date: 01 January 2026
• Published date: 01 January 2026
• Author: Rachel Laudan
• Subject Matter: Derecho Internacional

Quaestio facti. Revista Internacional sobre Razonamiento Probatorio / International Journal on Evidential Legal Reasoning

Año 2025 10 pp. 11-24

Quaestio facti. Revista Internacional sobre Razonamiento Probatorio

Quaestio facti. International Journal on Evidential Legal Reasoning

Sección: Homenaje a Larry Laudan

2025 l 10 pp. 11-24

Madrid, 2025

Marcial Pons Ediciones Jurídicas y Sociales

© Rachel Laudan

ISSN: 2604-6202

Editado bajo licencia Reconocimiento 4.0 Internacional de Creative Commons

BEHIND THE CV: REFLECTIONS ON LARRY LAUDAN’S

UNCONVENTIONAL ACADEMIC CAREER

Rachel Laudan

Larry’s academic career, as is typical, is summed up by that most ritualized of doc-

uments, the curriculum vitae, a dry catalog of education, awards, publications, and

academic positions. As far as the latter goes, his cv shows that at the age of 40 Larry

resigned from a top ight philosophy program at the University of Pittsburgh, one

that he had helped build. He moved to a edgling science studies center at Virginia

Tech, a university strongly oriented to agriculture and engineering, and consequent-

ly weak in the humanities. Shortly thereafter, Larry took a position as chair of the

philosophy department at the University of Hawaii, an institution marginal in every

way to American academic philosophy. In his mid 50s, he left academia. At 60 he

rejoined it, accepting a position at the National University of Mexico, pivotal in the

Spanish-speaking world, but unknown to most American academics. is succession

of university appointments was characterized by a friend as “scarcely conventional”

and regarded by most of his colleagues as something between quixotic and disastrous.

is “scarcely conventional” career resulted from Larry’s eort to reconcile his

lifelong pursuit of an intellectual problem with my own academic career, against the

background of academic politics. e intellectual problem was that of understanding

how to improve the inferences from the evidence to justied belief whether in a sci-

entic theory, a legal verdict, or in life more generally. My career, like all women’s in

the 1970s, had to be forged in the context of the century-long reluctant opening of

academia to others than white protestant males—Jews, working class, women, and

blacks among other. e career was further complicated by my penchant for sub-

jects unfashionable in my discipline of history and philosophy of science: geology,