Elizabeth Loftus' Lineage

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I need to know Elizabeth Loftus' lineage. Who she studied under, who her teachers studied under and so on. Her advisor was Partick Suppes. Do you know who he studied under?

-- Michelle Lochman (lochmam1@lasalle.edu), April 07, 2004

Answers

You will find Suppes' (it's pronounced "soup-ees") CV at http://www.stanford.edu/~psuppes/vitae.html. You will also find an autobiography of Suppes that begins at http://www.stanford.edu/~psuppes/autobio1.html. His supervisor was the famous philosopher of science, Ernest Nagel. Nagel, in turn, received his PhD in 1930 at Columbia. It appears from the entry at http://reference.allrefer.com/encyclopedia/N/Nagel-Er.html that Nagel's PhD supervisor was Morris R. Cohen. There is some information about Cohen at http://radicalacademy.com/amphilosophy8b.htm. According to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Cohen went to Harvard, earning his PhD in 1906. No supervisor's name is given, but he is said to have studied under William James, Josiah Royce, and Hugo Munsterberg. James' degree, of course, was in medicine, not in philosophy. Royce earned his PhD in 1878 at Johns Hopkins. G. Stanley Hall didn't take up his position at Hopkins until 1881, so Royce may have studied under the university president, Daniel Coit Gilman, who had previously been president of the University of California, Royce's undergraduate alma mater. Munsterberg studied at Leipzig under Wilhelm Wundt.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), April 07, 2004.

Check Dissertation Abstracts International for his dissertation. It should give the name of his advisor. You can also check PsycInfo for his early publications--often the published article is co-authored by the dissertaton chair.

Suppes earned his PhD in 1950 from Columbia with a dissertation on The Problem of Action at a Distance.

You can of course also see if there are obituaries of him, or other articles about him that might provide the information, but the best "method" is to check DAI and to go from there.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), April 07, 2004.


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