Kendall L. Walton, Ph.D., Charles L. Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and professor of philosophy in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and professor of art and design in the School of Art and Design, will retire from active faculty status on December 31, 2011.

Professor Walton received his B.A. degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, and his Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in 1967. He joined the University of Michigan faculty as a lecturer in philosophy in 1965, and was promoted to assistant professor in 1967, associate professor in 1972, and professor in 1979. He held the James B. and Grace J. Nelson Professorship in Philosophy from 1996-99, and was appointed Charles L. Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy in 1999. He was appointed professor of art and design in 2005.

Professor Walton is the most eminent living philosopher of art in the Anglo-American tradition. His seminal articles on central issues of aesthetics have spawned some of the most prominent current debates in the field and have also influenced metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. He has written on the nature of fiction, emotional responses to fiction, fictional entities, pictorial representation, photography, aesthetic value, aesthetic and moral value, metaphor, imagination, empathy, sports, and music, including musical expressiveness, representation, and experience. His many publications include Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations o fthe Representational Arts (1990), Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (2008), In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence (forthcoming), and much reprinted articles. Professor Walton's teaching and leadership have made Michigan a center for study in aesthetics. He has directed dissertations of many, now prominent, philosophers. He has held fellowships from a number of prestigious organizations, and his work has been the subject of five conferences held at universities in Britain and New Zealand. He has been president of the American Society for Aesthetics, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Nottingham (2005).

The Regents now salute this distinguished teacher and researcher by naming Kendall L. Walton professor emeritus of philosophy and professor emeritus of art and design.