Professor Bolton was a renowned expert on Aristotle who taught at Rutgers for 52 years. After earning his B.A. at Princeton (including a senior thesis on Plato’s Theory of Forms, directed by Gregory Vlastos), he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he worked with G.E.L. Owen, writing on Plato’s Cratylus. Rob earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, with a dissertation on the Cratylus under the direction of Julius Moravscik and Nicholas White. He came to Rutgers in 1971, where he eventually helped philosophy to become a research focused department with a strong graduate program; he served as Vice-Chair for Faculty Recruitment during crucial years of rapid growth. Rob was also chair of the committee that inaugurated a linguistics program at Rutgers, which then became an important department with close ties to philosophy.
Rob published over 30 articles and edited several volumes during his long scholarly career. Much of Rob’s work centered on Aristotle, specifically Aristotle’s philosophy of science, philosophical methodology, epistemology, and metaphysics. He was especially known for his work on Aristotle’s ideas about the nature of science and scientific inquiry, the nature of dialectic and its relationship to science, and the application of these methodological and epistemological ideas in Aristotle’s works. Rob challenged the once dominant view that Aristotle’s procedures of inquiry in his major works — e.g. Physics, De Anima, and Metaphysics — are philosophical and not scientific. Rob’s response to this approach to Aristotle included a substantial, new interpretation of the Posterior Analytics, and a demonstration of how the guide to genuine scientific inquiry in that work is manifested in Physics, De Anima, Metaphysics, and other works. He also mounted a defense of the thesis that, in his Ethics, Aristotle’s mode of inquiry is truly philosophical, and not scientific. In recent years, Rob continued to explore the interplay of philosophical and scientific inquiry in Aristotle, and the special mode of human understanding that Aristotle calls moral wisdom. He argued that moral wisdom differs both from scientific knowledge and from the philosophical mode of human understanding that Aristotle reaches in his Ethics.
His pioneering and influential approach to Aristotle’s philosophy of science and philosophical methodology can be found in such papers as: “Essentialism and Semantic Theory in Aristotle: Posterior Analytics, II, 7-10”, The Philosophical Review (1976); “Aristotle's Definitions of the Soul: De Anima II, 1-3”, Phronesis (1978); “Definition and scientific method in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and Generation of Animals”, in Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology (1987); “The Epistemological Basis of Aristotelian Dialectic”, in Biologie, Logique, et Metaphysique chez Aristote (1990); “Aristotle’s Method in Natural Science”, in Aristotle’s Physics (1991); “The Problem of Dialectical Reasoning (Συλλογισμόϛ) in Aristotle”, Ancient Philosophy (1994); “Aristotle's Conception of Metaphysics as a Science”, in Unity, Identity, and Explanation in Aristotle's Metaphysics (1994); “Science and the Science of Substance in Metaphysics Z”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (1995); “Aristotle on Essence and Necessity in Science”, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy (1997); “Aristotle: Epistemology and Methodology”, in The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy (2003); “Dialectic, Peirastic and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations”, History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis (2012); “The Search for Principles in
Aristotle: Posterior Analytics 2 and Generation of Animals 1”, in Aristotle's Generation of Animals: A Critical Guide (2017); and many more. (Much of his work is available at: https://philpapers.org/s/Robert%20Bolton.)
(Dean Zimmerman, Chris Hauser)
