Alexander Rosenberg
Alexander Rosenberg is an American philosopher and novelist. He is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, well known for contributions to philosophy of biology and philosophy of economics.
Rosenberg describes himself as a "naturalist".
Education and career
Rosenberg graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1963 and from the City College of New York in 1967. He received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1971. His thesis advisor was Peter Achinstein. He has taught philosophy at Dalhousie University, Syracuse University, University of California, Riverside, University of Georgia and, since 2000, at Duke University. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Oxford University, the Australian National University and Bristol University.He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1981, an American Council of Learned Societies fellow in 1983, won the Lakatos Award in 1993 and was the National Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Lecturer in 2006. In 2006-2007 he was a fellow of the National Humanities Center.
Rosenberg is married to Duke University professor Martha Ellen Reeves.
Rosenberg is an atheist, and a metaphysical naturalist.
Philosophical work
Rosenberg's early work focused on the philosophy of social science and especially the philosophy of economics. His doctoral dissertation, published as Microeconomic Laws in 1976, was the first treatment of the nature of economics by a contemporary philosopher of science. Over the period of the next decade he became increasingly skeptical about neoclassical economics as an empirical theory.He later shifted to work on issues in the philosophy of science that are raised by biology. He became especially interested in the relationship between molecular biology and other parts of biology. Rosenberg introduced the concept of supervenience to the treatment of intertheoretical relations in biology, soon after Donald Davidson began to exploit Richard Hare's notion in the philosophy of psychology. Rosenberg is among the few biologists and fewer philosophers of science who reject the consensus view that combines physicalism with antireductionism.
Rosenberg also coauthored an influential book on David Hume with Tom Beauchamp, Hume and the Problem of Causation, arguing that Hume was not a skeptic about induction but an opponent of rationalist theories of inductive inference.
''The Atheist's Guide to Reality''
Alex Rosenberg has the opinion that existence of the self is "an illusion."In 2011 Rosenberg published a defense of what he called "Scientism"—the claim that "the persistent questions" people ask about the nature of reality, the purpose of things, the foundations of value and morality, the way the mind works, the basis of personal identity, and the course of human history, could all be answered by the resources of science. This book was attacked on the front cover of The New Republic by Leon Wieseltier as "The worst book of the year". Wieseltier's claim, in turn, was critiqued as exaggeration by Philip Kitcher in The New York Times Book Review. On February 1, 2013, Rosenberg debated Christian apologist William Lane Craig on the question 'Is Faith in God Reasonable?' during which some of the arguments of the book were discussed.
Rosenberg has contributed articles to The New York Times Op/Ed series The Stone, on naturalism, science and the humanities, and meta-ethics, and the mind's powers to understand itself by introspection that arise from the views he advanced in ''The Atheist's Guide to Reality.''
''How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of our Addiction to Stories''
In 2018 Rosenberg published How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of our Addiction to Stories. This work develops the eliminative materialism of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, applying it to the role ‘the theory of mind’ plays in history and other forms of story telling. Rosenberg argues that the work of Nobel Prize winners, Eric Kandel, John O'Keefe and May-Britt Moser along with Edvard Moser reveals that the ‘‘theory of mind‘‘ employed in everyday life and narrative history has no basis in the organization of the brain. Evidence from evolutionary anthropology, child psychology, medical diagnosis and neural imaging reveals it is an innate or almost innate tool that arose in Hominini evolution to foster collaboration among small numbers of individuals in immediate contact over the near future, but whose predictive weakness beyond this domain reveals its explanatory emptiness.''Blunt Instrument: Why Economic Theory Can’t Get any Better…Why We Need It Anyway''
In 2025 Rosenberg published Blunt Instrument: Why Economic Theory Can’t Get any Better…Why We Need It Anyway. Rosenberg describes the book as an outsider’s guide to economic theory, that enables non-economists to see why it cannot make predictions and why its explanations are all post-hoc. The book explains economic theory’s largely mathematical expression as the result of nineteenth century marginalist economists interest in formally proving Adam Smith’s conjecture about the invisible hand in The Wealth of Nations, employing differential calculus, especially a simple version of the Lagrangian. The complete absence of money from microeconomics is traced to its rational choice theory foundations, while New Classical Macroeconomics, and especially Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models, are argued to consist in the result of microeconomics-driven thought experiments about corrigible but correctable rational expectations. Rosenberg seeks to show that the pervasiveness of market failure, particularly endemic to the inevitably monopsonistic labor market and the unavoidable rent-seeking of the financial market requires the employment of game theory. He concludes by seeking to show that only game theory can solve the incentive compatibility problems modern civilization faces in dealing with rapacious economic greed.Critical discussions of Rosenberg’s work
While attracting some interest for its arguments about the philosophy of mind, Rosenberg's critique of narrative history in How History Gets Things Wrong has attracted criticism in academic reviews. Reviewers including Alexandre Leskanich in The English Historical Review, Jacob Ivey in Philosophia, and Michael Douma in Journal of Value Inquiry faulted the book for failing to engage with literature in the philosophy of history and narratology and for oversimplified treatment of historical examples. Ivey also argued that Rosenberg's call for a Darwinian approach to historical explanation failed to acknowledge the limitations of past attempts to apply this approach and the complicated relationship in practice between Darwinian and humanistic methods in history.Rosenberg's treatment of fitness as a supervenient property, which is an undefined concept in the theory of natural selection, is criticized by Brandon and Beatty. His original development of how the supervenience of Mendelian concepts blocks traditional derivational reduction was examined critically by C. Kenneth Waters. His later account of reduction in developmental biology was criticized by Günter Wagner. Elliott Sober's "Multiple realization arguments against reductionism" reflects a shift towards Rosenberg's critique of anti-reductionist arguments of Putnam's and Fodor's.
Sober has also challenged Rosenberg's view that the principle of natural selection is the only biological law.
The explanatory role of the principle of natural selection and the nature of evolutionary probabilities defended by Rosenberg were subject to counter arguments by Brandon and later by Denis Walsh. Rosenberg's account of the nature of genetic drift and the role of probability in the theory of natural selection draws on significant parallels between the principle of natural selection and the second law of thermodynamics.
In the philosophy of social science, Rosenberg's more skeptical views about microeconomics were challenged first by Wade Hands, and later by Daniel Hausman in several books and articles. The 2008 financial crisis resulted in renewed attention to Rosenberg's skeptical views about microeconomics. Biologist Richard Lewontin and historian Joseph Fracchia express skepticism about Rosenberg's claim that functional explanations in social science require Darwinian underlying mechanisms.