Cicero: A Study in the Origins of Republican Philosophy

Robert T. Radford grew up in Dallas, Texas. He earned his B.A. degree in philosophy at Baylor University in 1954. Before finishing his first graduate degree, he taught the sixth grade in Charlestown, Indiana. After completing an M.A. degree in philosophy and religion at Baylor University, with a thesis on Nicolas Berdyaev, he taught philosophy, humanities, and history at Caney Jr. College (now Alice Lloyd College) in Pippa Passes, Kentucky. He did his doctoral studies in philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin and received his Ph.D. in 1970, with a dissertation on A. I. Melden's philosophy of action. Radford taught a wide variety of courses in philosophy and humanities at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma, beginning in 1963. Much of his work in the last decade of his teaching was in applied ethics and the philosophy of mind. He retired from the teaching faculty in 1994. He had been elected to serve two three-year terms as the Secretary of the General Faculty and the Faculty Council of OSU. Radford's publications and professional lectures include papers on Aristotle, freedom and determinism, character-trait theories, philosophy and parapsychology, the belief in survival of death, a schema for the analysis of case studies in ethics, and Cicero's political philosophy. He participated in a National Science Foundation grant examining the moral dilemmas of university scientists preparing environmental impact statements. He has served as a consultant for several publishers on introductory ethics textbooks. Radford has been a member and participant, since the early 1960s, in the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, the Mountain-Plains Philosophy Conference, and the Southwestern Philosophical Society.