Though Joel Richeimer entered UCLA as a mathematics major, he quickly moved to theoretical sociology. At UCLA, he studied with Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology: the sociological study of how ordinary people produce knowledge, how some ideas get so taken for granted that they become background and difficult, if not impossible, to see. Ethnomethodology led to a host of philosophical problems. Ultimately, if taken seriously, it undermined all research in any field, including itself.

Coming to the conclusion that ethnomethodology and academia were both dead-ends, Richeimer spent the next eleven years traveling and working in France, Britain, Israel, Japan and the United States, in restaurants, corporations, a factory and on two different communes.

Once Richeimer began to examine how theories are constructed, which is part of the philosophy of science, he saw the possibility of a solution to the philosophical problems generated by ethnomethodology. Also he began to understand that the structural errors found in ethnomethodology were not limited to that particular type of research. The same structure appeared in a number of popular philosophical movements, including logical positivism, phenomenology, reflexive sociology, the work of Thomas Kuhn, etc.

After getting a second bachelor's degree in philosophy at UC Berkeley, he went to the University of Michigan for graduate work. His dissertation was an outgrowth of these reflections. In particular, his dissertation focused on a particular case, namely, the widely held view that perception is underdetermined by the stimulus, the popular belief that the same event can generate different perceptions in different people. His dissertation attempts to show how that claim is an artifact of how experiments are designed and discussed. The underdetermination claim is not actually a scientific finding but imposed on the science by widely assumed and problematic theory. 

Richeimer came to Kenyon in 1992, and while the focus of his research has been in philosophy of perception, he teaches a wide range of courses including Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Film, Epistemology, Ancient Philosophy, Aristotle, Philosophy of Mathematics, Symbolic Logic and Pragmatism.

Areas of Expertise

Philosophy of perception, philosophy of science, epistemology, ancient philosophy.

Education

1992 — Doctor of Philosophy from Univ Michigan Ann Arbor

1992 — Master of Arts from Univ Michigan Ann Arbor

1973 — Bachelor of Arts from Univ of California Los Angeles

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