Charles J. McCracken was born in Los Angeles in 1933. He graduated from UCLA and got an M.A. from Fordham University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, both in philosophy. For thirty-four years (1965-1999), he taught philosophy at MSU. After retiring, he was a visiting professor of philosophy at Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was interested in virtually every branch of philosophy, but his specialty was the history of early modern philosophy. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, he published two books, one on the influence on British philosophy of the seventeenth-century French thinker Nicolas Malebranche, and the other (with Ian Tipton) on the sources of the idealist philosophy of the eighteenth-century Irish thinker George Berkeley. In 1998, he received MSU’s Distinguished Faculty Award. After his retirement, the Philosophy Department, through the generosity of a former student, established the annual Charles McCracken Distinguished Guest Lecture.
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