Susan Haack (; 23 July 1945 – 10 March 2026) was a British philosopher and academic who was a distinguished professor in the humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, professor of philosophy, and professor of law at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
Haack wrote on logic, the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Her pragmatism followed that of Charles Sanders Peirce.
Life and career
Education
Haack was a graduate of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge (B.A., B.Phil., Oxford; Ph.D., Cambridge). She was elected into Phi Beta Kappa as an honorary member. At Oxford, she studied at St. Hilda's College, where her first philosophy teacher was Jean Austin, the widow of J. L. Austin. As an undergraduate, she took Politics, Philosophy and Economics and said of her taste for philosophy: "it was, initially, the 'politics' part that most appealed to me. But somewhere down the line, despite encouragement from my politics tutor to pursue that subject, philosophy took over."
She studied Plato with Gilbert Ryle and logic with Michael Dummett. David Pears supervised her B.Phil. dissertation on ambiguity. At Cambridge, she wrote her PhD under the supervision of Timothy Smiley. She held the positions of Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge and professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick before taking a position at the University of Miami.
Haack said of her career that she was "very independent":