William J. Rapaport is CSE Eminent Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science
and Engineering, an affiliated faculty member emeritus in the Departments of Philosophy and of Linguistics,
and a member emeritus of the Center for Cognitive Science, all at State University of New York at Buffalo.
Prior to that, he was Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Fredonia.
He received a BA in mathematics from the University of Rochester, a PhD in philosophy from
Indiana University, and an MS in computer science from SUNY Buffalo. He also taught secondary-school
mathematics at Inwood Jr. High School 52 Manhattan and at the Walden School, both in New York City.
His research interests are in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics,
knowledge representation and reasoning, contextual vocabulary acquisition, philosophy of mind, philosophy
of language, critical thinking, and cognitive development. His research has been supported by the National
Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
He is a co-author of Logic: A Computer Approach, the co-editor of Thought, Language, and
Ontology: Essays in Memory of Hector-Neri Casta˜neda; has written over 100 articles in computer science,
philosophy, cognitive science, and education; and has been Review Editor of the cognitive science journal
Minds and Machines and on the editorial boards of the journals Computational Linguistics and Machine
Translation, the philosophy journal Noˆus, the cognitive science book series Studies in Cognitive Systems, and
the American Philosophical Association Newsletters on Teaching Philosophy and on Pre-College Instruction
in Philosophy. He is currently writing a textbook on the Philosophy of Computer Science. A complete list
of his writings can be found at: http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/rapaport/papers.html
He is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the International
Association for Computing and Philosophy’s Covey Award for “senior scholars with a substantial record
of innovative research in the field of computing and philosophy broadly conceived”, and the American
Philosophical Association’s Barwise Prize “for significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to
philosophy and computing by an APA member”.
He was the editor and publisher of Bill Rapaport’s Buffalo Restaurant Guide on the Web, is the
author of “How to Study” (also on the Web), and is one of the discoverers of the grammatically correct
sentence “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.” (or, in one of its lengthier versions, “Buffalo buffalo
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”).
Rapaport can be reached at:
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260;
e-mail: [email protected];
website: http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport