Tamar Gendler

After graduating from college, she worked for several years as an assistant to Linda Darling-Hammond at the RAND Corporation’s education policy division in Washington, DC.

Since July 2014, Gendler served as the inaugural Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale.

She is best known for her work on thought experiments, imagination—particularly on the phenomenon of imaginative resistance—and for coining the term alief.

On September 3, 2013, Gendler delivered the Keynote address to Yale freshmen during the class of 2017 matriculation ceremony. Her topic was "Keeping inconsistency in your pockets."

Gendler has held Fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship Program in the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies/Ryskamp Fellowship Program, the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon New Directions Program. In 2012, she was appointed as the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy at Yale. In 2013, she was awarded the Yale College-Sidonie Miskimin Clauss ’75 Prize for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities.

Gendler taught philosophy at Yale University (1996–97), Syracuse University (1997–2003) and Cornell University (2003–06), before returning to Yale in 2006 as Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Yale University Cognitive Science Program (2006–2010). On July 1, 2010, she became Chair of the Yale University Department of Philosophy, becoming the first woman to hold that position in the department’s history and the first female graduate of Yale College to chair a Yale Department. She held the position until 2013, when she was appointed as Deputy Provost for Humanities and Initiatives.

Her philosophical articles have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Philosophical Perspectives, Mind & Language, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, and The Philosophical Quarterly. Her 2008 essay “Alief and Belief” was selected by the Philosopher’s Annual as one of the 10 best articles published in philosophy in 2008.

She is the author of Thought Experiments: On the Powers and Limits of Imaginary Cases (Routledge, 2000) and Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology (Oxford, 2010), and editor or co-editor of The Elements of Philosophy (Oxford 2008), Perceptual Experience (Oxford, 2006), Conceivability and Possibility (Oxford 2002). She is also co-editor of the journal Oxford Studies in Epistemology and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology.

In 1996, she earned her philosophy Ph.D. at Harvard University, with Robert Nozick, Derek Parfit and Hilary Putnam as her advisors.

As an undergraduate, she studied at Yale University, where she was a championship debater in the American Parliamentary Debate Association and a member of Manuscript Society. She graduated summa cum laude in 1987 with Distinction in Humanities and Math & Philosophy.

Tamar Szabó Gendler (born December 20, 1965) is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale as well as the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy and a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences at Yale University. Her academic research focuses on issues in philosophical psychology, epistemology, metaphysics, and areas related to philosophical methodology.

Gendler was born in 1965 in Princeton, New Jersey to Mary and Everett Gendler, a Conservative rabbi. She grew up in Andover, Massachusetts, where she attended the Andover public schools and then Phillips Academy Andover.