Roderick Chisholm was a twentieth-century American philosopher who made major contributions in almost every area of philosophy, but most notably in epistemology and metaphysics. Chisolm was an undergraduate at Brown University from 1934 to 1938 and a graduate student at Harvard from 1938 to 1942. He served in the military from 1942 to 1946, and then, after briefly holding a teaching post with the Barnes Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania, he returned in 1947 to Brown University, where he remained until his death.

Epistemology

In epistemology Chisholm was a defender of foundationalism. He asserted that any proposition that it is justified for a person to believe gets at least part of its justification from basic propositions, which are themselves justified but not by anything else. Contingent propositions are basic insofar as they correspond to self-presenting states of the person, which for Chisholm are states such that whenever one is in...