Richard Joyce
Professor of Philosophy
Victoria University of Wellington
Academic genealogy:
I’ll start with the disclaimer that (of course) I don’t assume that one iota of intellectual kudos accrues to me from having impressive figures in my academic ancestry. Still, as an exercise in finding historical connections, I do find it rather fun…
Richard Joyce received his PhD from Princeton in 1998; his advisor was Gilbert Harman.
Harman received his PhD from Harvard in 1964; his advisor was Willard V. Quine.
Quine received his PhD from Harvard in 1932; his advisor was Alfred Whitehead.
Whitehead graduated from Cambridge in 1884; his advisor was Edward Routh.
Routh graduated from Cambridge in 1857; his advisor was William Hopkins.
Hopkins graduated from Cambridge in 1830; his advisor was Adam Sedgwick.
Sedgwick graduated from Cambridge in 1811; his advisor was Thomas Jones.
Jones graduated from Cambridge in 1782; his advisor was Thomas Postlethwaite.
Postlethwaite graduated from Cambridge in 1756; his advisor was Stephen Whisson.
Whisson graduated from Cambridge in 1742; his advisor was Walter Taylor.
Taylor graduated from Cambridge in 1723; his advisor was Robert Smith.
Smith graduated from Cambridge in 1715; his advisor was Roger Cotes.
Cotes graduated from Cambridge in 1706; his advisor was Isaac Newton.
Newton graduated from Cambridge in 1668; his advisor was Isaac Barrow.
Barrow graduated from Cambridge in 1652. He later traveled to Florence where he studied under Vincenzo Viviani.
Viviani was, from 1639-42, the student and assistant of Galileo Galilei.
Galileo and Viviani (Tito Lessi, 1892)
Getting back to Galileo is all very well, but we can do better than that. Below is another genealogy stretching back a thousand years. I’ve had to be a little more relaxed about the nature of the inter-generational links, since the relation of “academic advisor” varies a lot over different times and cultures. For a few of the more obscure connections, I’ve supplied footnotes.
Richard Joyce received his PhD in 1998 from Princeton; his advisor was Gideon Rosen.
Rosen graduated from Princeton in 1992; his advisor was Paul Benacerraf.
Benacerraf graduated from Princeton in 1960; his advisor was Hilary Putnam.
Putnam graduated from UCLA in 1951; his advisor was Hans Reichenbach.
Reichenbach graduated from the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in 1916; his advisor was Max Noether.
Noether graduated from Heidelberg in 1868; his advisor was Otto Hesse.
Hesse graduated from Königsberg in 1840; his advisor was Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi.
Jacobi graduated from Berlin in 1825; his advisor was Enno Dirksen.
Dirksen graduated from Göttingen in 1817; his advisor was Johann Tobias Mayer.
Mayer graduated from Göttingen in 1773; his advisor was Abraham Gotthelf Kästner.
Kästner graduated from Leipzig in 1739; his advisor was Christian August Hausen.
Hausen graduated from the University of Wittenberg in 1713; his advisor was Johann Andreas Planer.
Planer graduated from Wittenberg in 1686; his advisor was Johann Pasch.
Pasch graduated from Wittenberg in 1683; his advisor was Michael Walther.
Walther graduated from Wittenberg in 1687; his advisor was Johann Andreas Quenstedt.
Quenstedt graduated from Wittenberg in 1644; his advisor was Christoph Notnagel (whose daughter Michael Walther married).
Notnagel graduated from Wittenberg in 1630; his advisor was Ambrose Rhode.
Rhode graduated from Wittenberg in 1600. He later studied in Prague under Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.
Tycho Brahe studied at Wittenberg in 1566 under Caspar Peucer.
Peucer graduated from Wittenberg in 1545; his advisor was Georg Joachim Rheticus.
Rheticus spent 1539-40 in Frombork (on leave from Wittenberg), where his mentor was Nicolaus Copernicus.
Copernicus was taught astronomy, while at Bologna in 1497, by Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara.
Novara was taught astronomy by Johannes Müller (Regiomontanus) during the latter’s travels in Italy in the 1460s.
Regiomontanus’s patron and teacher (from 1460-63) was Basilios Bessarion.
Bessarion was a Catholic Cardinal and also the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople (1463-72). In Mystras in the 1420s he studied under Gemistos Plethon.
Plethon (c.1360-1454) studied in Constantinople and Adrianople. (He was also the teacher of the young John Argylopolous, who would later count Leonardo da Vinci among his pupils.) Plethon’s teacher in Constantinople around 1390 was Demetrios Kydones. [1]
Kydones (c.1324-98) was the first to translate Aquinas into Greek. His teacher, during his youth in Thessalonika, was Neilos Kabasilas.
Kabasilas (c.1298-1363) was Metropolitan of Thessalonika (1361-63). He was a follower of Gregory Palamas, his predecessor in that office (1347-59).
Palamas (c.1296-1359) was Metropolitan of Thessalonika and originator of the so-called “Palamite heresy.” (Incidentally, his great adversary in this debate, Barlaam of Seminara, would later teach Greek to Petrarch.) Palamas was, in his Constantinopolitan youth, instructed in logic by Theodore Metochites. [2]
Metochites (c.1270-1332) was Grand Logothete of Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos. He studied astronomy in Constantinople (1312-13) under the private tuition of Manuel Bryennios.
Bryennios (c.1275-1340) studied in Constantinople and learned astronomy from Gregory Chioniades.
Chioniades (c.1240-1320) traveled from Constantinople to Persia, where he learned maths and astronomy from Shams al‐Dīn al‐Bukhārī at the Ilkhanate Court at Tabriz in 1296 (about 20 years after Marco Polo came through Tabriz).
Shams al‐Dīn al‐Bukhārī studied at Maragheh Observatory under Nasir al-Dīn al-Tūsī.
Tūsī (1201-74) established trigonometry as an independent mathematical discipline. His philosophy teacher in Nishapur was Farīd al-Dīn al-Dāmād.
Farīd al-Dīn al-Dāmād (d. 1242) studied under Sadr al-Dīn al-Sarakhsī. [3]
Sadr al-Dīn al-Sarakhsī’s teacher was Afdal al-Dīn Farīd al-Ghīlānī (or al-Gīlānī). [4]
Al-Gīlānī’s teacher was (in Kūrāshān) Abū al-‘Abbās al-Lawkarī. [5]
Abū al-‘Abbās al-Lawkarī was a student of the Zoroastrian mathematician, Abu Hassan Bahmanyār bin Marzubān (d. 1066), the latter of whom also taught Omar Khayyām.
Bahmanyār was (in Isfahan, sometime in the 1020s-30s) the friend, collaborator, and student of Ibn Sīnā, aka Avicenna (980-1037).
Ibn Sīnā, aka Avicenna
Footnotes:
1. See C. Baloglou, Georgios Gemistos-Plethon: ökonomisches Denken in der spätbyzantinischen Geisteswelt (S.D. Basilopoulos, 1998): p. 25.
2. See M. Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas (OUP, 2012): p. 53. [Extra for history wonks: There are online academic genealogies that connect Palamas to Metochites via Nikephoros Gregoras. Metochites certainly taught Nikephoros Gregoras. And Palamas was taught by Nikephoros the Hesychast. But those are two different Nikephoroses.]
3. See A. Rahim, “The Twelver-šīʿī Reception of Avicenna in the Mongol Period,” in D. Reisman (ed.), Before and after Avicenna (Brill, 2003): p. 223.
4. See M. Meyerhof, “’Alī al-Bayhaqī’s Tatimmat Siwān al-Hikma: A Biographical Work on Learned Men of the Islam,” Osiris 8 (1948): pp. 206-7.
5. See R. Marcotte, “Preliminary notes on the life and work of Abū al-‘Abbās al-Lawkarī (d. ca. 517/1123),” Anaquel de Estudios Arabes 17 (2006).
Richard’s homepage is here.