Honorary Degrees
Pierre Briant, Professor d’Histoire de l’Antiquité, Université de Toulouse. Presentation by Matthew W. Stolper, Professor in the Oriental Institute, the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, and the College. Pierre Briant is the foremost living historian of the Achaemenid Persian empire—the empire founded by Cyrus the Great and toppled by Alexander the Great, which brought about political unity and cultural interconnection on a scale that was unparalleled before the Roman Empire. His work has opened wholly new historical themes. It has drawn upon and refined the problems and results of many fields—classical studies, Assyriology, Egyptology, Biblical history, Iranistics, and others; it has woven together evidence from different registers of implication, linking the lives of the imperial court and the survival and transformation of provincial societies; it has culminated in an encyclopedic history of the empire that eclipses all predecessors. He has crossed disciplinary boundaries, set agendas, raised standards, and sharpened methods. He has changed the terms in which the predecessors and successors of the Achaemenids can be studied. He has been an acute critic, a generous colleague, and a vivid exponent to the larger reading public. He has shown a generation of scholars once isolated from each other that they are members of a common intellectual project of great consequence.
Daniel C. Tsui, Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University. Presentation by Thomas F. Rosenbaum, Professor in the Department of Physics, the James Franck Institute, and the College. Daniel Tsui is renowned for his ability to probe quantum behavior on a macroscopic scale and to choreograph interactions between electrons, discovering new ways to parse charge and spin. His work on the collective behavior of sheets of electrons has profoundly influenced the direction taken by condensed matter physics over the past two decades, and it has fostered fundamental connections to plasma physics and modern field theories. Professor Tsui combines the high art of materials science with the incisive insight of the best physics. His discovery of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect opened new experimental and theoretical vistas, and his experiments continue to reveal the essential quantum nature of materials. Professor Tsui is not only an extraordinary scientist, but also a widely admired individual, both for his human qualities and for the leadership role he has assumed in the community. He has bridged industry and academia, science and engineering. As one of our own (University of Chicago Ph.D., 1967), he embodies the pure dedication to scholarship to which we and our students aspire.
Bernard Williams, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley. Presentation by Michael Forster, Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the College. Bernard Williams is, deservedly, one of the most widely and deeply respected philosophers of his generation—indeed, within his current field of specialization, ethics, simply the most widely and deeply respected philosopher of his generation. He has published extensively on the history of philosophy and the philosophy of mind as well as on ethics. At a time when Anglo-American philosophy was in serious danger of lapsing into narrowness and irrelevance, he did more than anyone else to restore it to breadth and relevance—stretching its horizons beyond its staple questions to encompass the concerns of literature, themes from continental philosophy, ruminations on death, and much else besides. His work, both on standard philosophical subjects and in these less traditional areas, is distinguished by a rare combination of philosophical originality, analytical rigor, breadth of vision, erudition, stylish prose, and wit. In addition, he has played an important role in public life (especially in Britain), bringing his intellectual clarity and moral decency to bear on the treatment of issues of vital social importance (such as those surrounding pornography). In short, Bernard Williams embodies modern philosophy at its best.
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