John Findlay Visiting Professor, Fall 2006
Home Institution: Tel Aviv University
Interests: Wittgenstein, Hobbes, human rights, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion
Professor Biletzki has been teaching at the philosophy department in Tel Aviv University since 1979. She has also traveled widely, as visiting scholar and fellow at, among others, Cambridge University, Harvard University, the Wittgenstein Archives in Bergen, and the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
Professor Biletzki’s publications include Paradoxes (1996), Talking Wolves: Thomas Hobbes on the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language (1997), What Is Logic? (2002), (Over)Interpreting Wittgenstein (2003), and articles on Wittgenstein, Hobbes, analytic philosophy, political thought, and human rights. She also co-edited The Story of Analytic Philosophy and translated Quine and Austin into Hebrew. Her professional and philosophical interests converge in the area of human rights and she is often invited abroad – for public lecturing, for seminars at human rights conferences, for interviews, and for meetings with human rights counterparts all over the world. Until recently she was chairperson of the board of B’Tselem – the Israeli Information center for Human Rights.
At Boston University in the fall semester of 2006, Professor Biletzki will teach “Reasoning and Argumentation” (PH160) and an advanced seminar entitled “The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights” (PH459/659).