Thomas McCarthy (born 1940) is John Shaffer Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Northwestern University. Before joining Northwestern in 1985, he taught for four years at Munich University and for thirteen years at Boston University. After retiring from Northwestern in 2006, he served for three years as William H. Orrick Visiting Professor at Yale University. Over the course of his academic career, McCarthy's work was supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Early in his career he wrote and taught principally in the philosophy of logic and mathematics and then in the philosophy of the social sciences. Subsequently, and for the bulk of hi