Laura J. Snyder received her B.A. from Brandeis University, summa cum laude, with highest honors in both Philosophy and the History of Western Thought for her senior thesis on Rousseau and Kant. After working as a researcher for a management consulting firm and an editor for the textbook division of Prentice-Hall, Snyder attended Johns Hopkins University. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy and a certificate in the History and Philosophy of Science in 1996. Later that year she was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at St. John's. During her career Snyder has been awarded fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the U.S. Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education. She has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and the University of Pennsylvania, a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge (where she is now a Life Member), and the Redfield visiting assistant professor at the University of Chicago. She was recently elected to the steering committee of the international History of Philosophy of Science Society. Snyder was promoted to associate professor with tenure at St. John's in 2003.
Snyder's main area of scholarly research is the history and philosophy of science; she is also interested in the history of modern philosophy, epistemology, and the history of moral and political thought. She has just finished a book on the famous nineteenth-century debate between John Stuart Mill and William Whewell over scientific induction, embedding this controversy within the broader context of Victorian conflicts regarding morality, politics and economics. Snyder has published articles on Mill, Whewell, Francis Bacon, the debate over whether there is intelligent life on other planets, and the issue of scientific evidence in the journals Philosophy of Science, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, and Perspectives on Science, and in several books, including the textbook Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues (Norton). She is the author of the entry on Whewell in the Stanford On-line Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu).
When she is not teaching or writing, Snyder can frequently be found at performances of the off Off-Broadway Peccadillo Theater company, running the box office and the intermission bar. She spends spare moments studying Italian.
snyderl@stjohns.edu