Professor Mark Rollins who joined the Department of Philosophy in 1987 is retiring this summer.
Over the course of his time at Washington University, Rollins has held numerous leadership and administrative roles, but most important to our Department, Rollins served as Chair of Philosophy from 2002 to 2010. During this time, he nurtured the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology undergraduate program, and presided over an exciting period of development for the faculty and graduate programs. Rollins was the person most responsible for the Department’s rise as a nationally recognized graduate program from the early 2000’s. He was superb at identifying and then patiently recruiting faculty who might never have considered a move to St. Louis had it not been for his gentle, but persistent efforts. When he stepped down after eight years as Chair, every member of the Department had either been hired or promoted during his tenure. In recognition of these and his many other leadership accomplishments, Rollins received the Arts & Sciences Distinguished Leadership Award in 2014.
Rollins’s research was far reaching, leading him to explore topics in philosophy of mind, analytic philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of science, epistemology, and aesthetics. He is the author of Mental Imagery: On the Limits of Cognitive Science as well as the editor of two other books.
He taught courses in both Philosophy and in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology (PNP) program, an innovative interdisciplinary course of study that he helped develop at Washington University as both an administrator and teacher. (His course “Art and the Mind-Brain” has been a popular mainstay for PNP undergraduate students for many years.) Rollins will now assume emeritus status.