Howard Richards (June 10, 1938 – April 7, 2024) was an American-Chilean philosopher of Social Science who worked with the concepts of basic cultural structuresRichards What the World Needs Now. Cultural action to transform the basic structures of the modern world is a general concept that unites most of Richards' writing - see: Richards (2014): p. 1 and 8. Methods for Transforming the Structures of the Modern World is the subtitle of Vol.II of Letters from Quebec. and constitutive rules.Constitutive rule, a key concept rooted in the work of John Searle and Charles Taylor and in Richards' Oxford tutor Rom Harré's rules-oriented approach to the explanation of social behavior. One can find a good description of what Prof Richards understands by Constitutive Rules in his 2010 speech at the University of South Africa (UNISA) Humanizing Methodologies in Transformation. He held the title of research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, a liberal arts college in Richmond, Indiana, the United States, the Quaker School where he taught for thirty years. He retired from Earlham College, together with his wife Caroline Higgins in 2007, and became a research professor of philosophy. He held a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara, (Santa Barbara Ph.D. Dissertation). a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the Stanford Law School, an Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) from Oxford University (the UK) and a Ph.D. in Educational Planning With the first field in Curriculum Planning and a second field in Applied Psychology and Moral Education with a doctoral thesis on the Chilean PPH (Parents and Children) Project, published as "The Evaluation of Cultural Action" (). from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, Canada. He taught at the University of Santiago, Chile,On the doctoral program in Management Science and the undergraduate program in Ingenieria Comercial (Economics). and had ongoing roles at the University of South Africa (UNISA) Development Education p. 3; School of Human Sciences. and the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Business program. He is founder of the Peace and Global Studies ProgramThe name of the Program has varied over the years from Peace Studies to Peace and Conflict Studies and then, continuing until now, Peace and Global Studies. and co-founder of the Business and Nonprofit Management Program at Earlham.Howard Richards profile.

Early life Howard Richards was born in Pasadena. California, the United States, the eldest child of Kenneth F. Richards, a truck mechanic, originally from Connecticut, and his wife Donna.(McCune) It was his mother's intellectual interest in philosophers such as Henri Bergson which prompted the family to break its ties with Mormonism. His paternal grandparents fell into unemployment in Connecticut during the Great Depression and moved to Pasadena in 1932. It was his uncle Jack from his mother's side, who died during World War II,p 257 in Understanding the Global Economy and under "The Holocaust" in Richards, 2002. and especially his mother who fostered his early intellectual interest.see eg TOPICA

Academic background After graduating from Redlands High School, CA, in June 1956, Richards enrolled in the same year as a Philosophy undergraduate at Yale. Being a top student, he was allowed to skip one year of the normal three-year Major in Philosophy course. Afterward, he was admitted to Stanford Law School in 1958, graduating with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1961. Later in that year, he enrolled in graduate school at the University of California Santa Barbara, earning an M.A. in Philosophy there in 1964 with a thesis on Jean-Paul Sartre. (MA Philosophy Thesis). Simultaneously he worked at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions think tank where he contributed several articles to the in-house Center Magazine.a.o. an article entitled "A normative Economics" - see Richards Bibliography Articles. In 1965 he left for Chile, where they ultimately would settle in the town of Limache. Soon after their arrival, Howard took up the post of dean of studies at the Santiago College, (a college in Chile is a secondary school). While in Santiago, Howard joined the Chilean Ministry of Education as an advisor to President Eduardo Frei's Educational Reform, working on a Secondary Curriculum influenced by the ideas of the Brazilian Educator Paulo FreireCPEIP-MINEDUC - Centro de Perfeccionamiento, Experimentación e Investigaciones Pedagógicas. Ministerio de la Educación. In late 1970 Richards and his family left for the UK where Richards enrolled for an Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) at Oxford University, simultaneously doing one on one tutorials and attending seminars by the philosophers Rom Harré and A. J. Ayer.See eg Harré, who had a strong influence on Richards' thinking. He graduated with an honors thesis on Piaget."The Concept of Causality in the Light of Piaget's Research on the Scientific Thinking of Children" Thesis, Oxford University, 1973. Translated as Richards, 1974 El Desarollo Intelectual del Niño (see eg: Prospects UNESCO 1977 Vol. VII No. 4. p 557). Back in Chile in 1972, now under president Salvador Allende, he continued to work with Freire's ideas at CIDE (Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Educación - Educational Research and Development Center) where he founded the Parents and Children Program (Programa Padres e Hijos - PHH), a Community Development combined with a Parent Education program. Spanish EnglishHoward Richards and Loren Pierce, 1993 "Cooperative, Community-based Evaluation of Preschool Programs". UNESCO and the Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO. pp 303-323.McKee, Neill. "Teaching Parents Teaching Children." The IDRC Reports (Ottawa) 10, no. 3 (Oct. 1981): 16-17.

Richards and his family left Chile in 1974, after Pinochet's 1973 coup d'état, but not before having helped friends and colleagues escape Pinochet's DINA police.As described in Sweet Country, a book authored by Howard's wife Caroline and which was later (1987) turned into a film of the same name (re: Sweet Country) by the Greek director Michael Cacoyannis. The philosophy curriculum Richards had helped develop was repealed shortly after the coup but was adopted in several other Latin American countries. In September 1974 Richards and his family returned to the USA where he started work at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. Later that year he successfully defended his doctoral thesis in Philosophy at the University of California Santa Barbara, having done the preparatory work when still in Chile. Distributive Justice Doctoral Thesis. While based in Richmond, he attended the Lawrence Kohlberg Summer School on Moral Education at Harvard University. Richards became a professor at Earlham College and was the founding director of its Peace and Global Studies program until 1989 and part-time Director until 2004. Between 1981 and 1985, Richards combined commitments in Richmond with those at OISE, Toronto, with the occasional stay in Quebec where their daughters were studying at a French-speaking school, he enrolled in another Ph.D. program in Education, with the first field in curriculum planning and a second field in applied psychology and moral education, at the University of Toronto's Institute for Studies in Education (UT/OISE), which he successfully completed with a doctoral thesis based on the Chilean PPH program.This OISE thesis was published as and translated into English as . He also became an active contributor to the OISE-based active think-tank about the new economic paradigm known as The Transformative Learning Centre (TLC).

Social engagement, research and teaching At Stanford Law School (1958–61) he co-founded the Stanford Political Union's Socialist Caucus,see eg The Stanford Daily Volume 138, Issue 20, 20 October 1960, p 2. became involved in the Peace Movement and began volunteer work for farm labor causes. He co-founded, with Stanford radical books seller Roy Kepler, Ira Sandperl and others, the Peninsula Peace Center, effectively running it for a while. He was also editor and author of a modest journal called Utopian Papers. After graduation from law school (1961), he joined the Santa Barbara, California Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions headed by Robert Hutchins to whom he became a personal assistant,Online Archive of California Series 3. Howard Richards, 1955-1965 and became the first volunteer attorney for Cesar Chavez' Farm Workers Association when he started organizing the FWA in Delano, California.Eg Dilemmas of Social Democracies and Online Archive of California He worked as evaluator of cultural change projects in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile see eg: Richards PASCAL profile. He also did evaluative work on economic institutions (Economía Solidaria) in Argentina.Richards, H. (2015) (Local Development: a response to the challenges of Globalization) Rosario, Argentina. / Richards, H. (2014) Hacia un Marco Jurídico para la Economía Solidaria (Towards a legal framework for the Economy of Solidarity). Economic theory and Community Development together with Public Employment Programs are his more recent research areas.Peace & Collaborative Development Network PCDN (HR personal info).

He is on the advisory board of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (HumanDHS), a global transdisciplinary fellowship of concerned academics and practitioners who wish to promote dignity and transcend humiliation.HumanDHS Global Economics Team; HumanDHS Annual Meeting 2013, South Africa. Richards' principal teaching experience stretches from 1974 to 2007 as Professor of Philosophy and Education on the Peace and Global Studies Program (PAGS) at Earlham College.See: PAGS College Curriculum. When no longer at Earlham, he taught short courses in different international locations.University of Buenos Aires: Negotiation and Change; Montoya Institute, Posadas, Argentina: Methodology of Peace; Transcend Peace University, Cluj, Romania: Peace Business; Instituto Pastoral (Pastoral Institute), LA Diocese, California: Social Sciences, as well as single classes, a.o. at University of Chile, Xavier University, Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Chile), University of California, San Diego, and other places. (see eg: Topica.com) Starting in 2009 he became a distinguished fellow of the South African Research Chairs Initiative in Development Education (SARChI) based at the University of South Africa (UNISA) Pretoria, and then a collaborator at the Johannesburg-based Seriti Institute with Dr. Gavin Andersson. In South Africa, too, he teaches in the Executive MBA Program at the University of Cape Town.MBA Programme. He is also co-chair of the Chilean group Repensar Ia Economía (Re-thinking the Economy).REPENSAR and UNIVERSITAS NUEVA CIVILIZACIÓN (New Civilization University) Santiago, Chile.

Law practice Howard Richards was the first volunteer attorney for Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, when they started to organize farm workers in Delano, in California's Central Valley. Richards specialized in Bankruptcy as a partner in the firm of Crane, Richards, and Flores after joining the Legal Aid Foundation in 1989. In 1990 he also was a voluntary attorney at the Los Angeles Free Clinic,Justicia members. a practice he wound up in 2004, when he moved back to Limache, Chile.

Major works and ideas