John Etchemendy

Who is John Etchemendy?

John W. Etchemendy is Stanford University's twelfth and current Provost. He succeeded John L. Hennessy to the post on September 1, 2000.

John Etchemendy received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Nevada, Reno before earning his PhD in philosophy at Stanford in 1982.

He has been a faculty member in Stanford's Department of Philosophy since 1983, prior to which he was a faculty member in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University. He is also a faculty member of Stanford's Symbolic Systems Program and a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford.

Etchemendy's research interests include logic, semantics and the philosophy of language. He has challenged orthodox views on the central notions of truth, logical consequence and logical truth. His most well-known book, The Concept of Logical Consequence, criticizes Alfred Tarski's widely accepted analysis of logical consequence. The Liar: An essay on truth and circularity, co-authored with the late Jon Barwise, develops a formal account of the Liar Paradox modelled using a version of set theory incorporating the so-called Anti-Foundation Axiom.