390–391

10.1093/philmat/nkx024
Philosophia Mathematica
Advance Access Publication on August 23, 2017

Richard Lane Tieszen, 1951–2017

Richard Tieszen, professor of philosophy at San José State University and a

member of the editorial board of Philosophia Mathematica, died March 28,
2017 in Zen Hospice in San Francisco. He had been diagnosed with cancer eight
years before and had had some radical treatments, but by the beginning of
March his options had run out.
Tieszen was born in Mitchell, South Dakota, in 1951. When he was a child
the family moved to Pico Rivera, California, where he attended school. He
also attended Rio Hondo Community College in Whittier. In 1970 the family
moved to Colorado, and Tieszen graduated from Colorado State University in
Fort Collins in 1974. He received an M.A. from the Graduate Faculty of the New
School for Social Research in 1978. There he studied Husserl and phenomenol-
ogy with J.N. Mohanty and Izchak Miller. He then entered the Ph.D. program
at Columbia University. He continued to study Husserl but described himself
as trained in analytical philosophy. He defended his dissertation in the fall of
1986, with the undersigned as principal advisor, but the degree was officially
conferred in May 1987. After a couple of temporary jobs, he joined the faculty
of San José State University in 1989 and remained there until his death. He
held visiting appointments at several institutions in Europe and America. From
2012 his heavy teaching load was somewhat reduced because of his illness.
Tieszen’s writings reveal his broad knowledge of Husserl’s philosophy, from
his early Philosophy of Arithmetic to the late Crisis of European Sciences. After
his education at the New School and Columbia, he participated in discussions
of Husserl and other phenomenological writers with colleagues from other Cal-
ifornia universities, particularly Dagfinn Føllesdal and Hubert Dreyfus. He was
probably the only participant whose main focus was on philosophy of mathe-
matics. This journal frequently called on him to referee submitted papers with
a phenomenological approach. He also developed relations with the logicians at
Stanford, in the group led by Solomon Feferman.
Tieszen was a productive writer from the beginning. His dissertation led to
the book Mathematical Intuition: Phenomenology and Mathematical Knowledge
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). He published a number of articles and reviews, a

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selection of which were collected in Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy

of Mathematics (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Tieszen also co-edited two
books, Between Logic and Intuition: Essays in Honor of Charles Parsons (with
Gila Sher, Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Constructive Engagement
of Analytic and Continental Approaches to Philosophy (with Bo Mou, Leiden:
Brill, 2013).
In addition to his thorough knowledge of Husserl, Tieszen expressed himself
clearly. He did not think of Husserl as belonging to a different philosophical
world from that of his teachers at Columbia or those writing on philosophy of
mathematics. His work belongs to the appropriation of Husserl by philosophers
in the analytic tradition.
Early in his career he began to write about Kurt Gödel. It was known that
Gödel began to study Husserl seriously in 1959 and recommended his writ-
ings to visitors to the Institute for Advanced Study. At a time when little
documentation of Gödel’s understanding of Husserl was available, Tieszen in
his essay ‘Kurt Gödel and phenomenology’ (1992, reprinted in his collection)
applied his understanding of Husserl to the interpretation of Gödel’s philo-
sophical thought. The same strategy underlies his book After Gödel (Oxford
University Press, 2011), which is more consciously reconstructive in develop-
ing a view he calls ‘constituted platonism’, a view that, he argues, meets the
requirements of Gödel’s avowed platonism but is constructed from Husserlian
materials.
Tieszen was highly regarded as a teacher, and his readers can see his peda-
gogical sense at work in his last publication, Simply Gödel (New York: Simply
Charly, 2017), an exposition of Gödel’s work for a general audience. The book
was in press at the time of Tieszen’s death. A few weeks before, Dagfinn
Føllesdal visited him at the Zen Hospice, and they planned a joint publica-
tion, of Gödel’s notes on Husserl’s writings, with commentary. It is to be hoped
that this will appear soon.
Tieszen is survived by his wife Nancy, his parents James and Beverly Tieszen,
and his sisters Sandra Tait, Patricia Anderson, and Pamela Hobbs.

Charles Parsons∗
Harvard University
2017-06-22

*
I am indebted to Rick Tieszen’s sister Patricia Anderson, especially for information
about his family and early life, and to the memorial notice posted by his department at San
José State University, http://www.sjsu.edu/philosophy/RickTieszenMemoriam/. Thanks
also to Dagfinn Føllesdal and the editor for comments.