Richard G. Heck, an associate professor of philosophy, has received a rare internal tenure offer, Faculty members in the philosophy department said yesterday.

Heck is an expert in the philosophy of language as well as in philosophy related to logic and mathematics.

He is the first junior Faculty member to be offered tenure from within the department since 1982, according to Warren D. Goldfarb '69, the last associate professor to be given tenure in the department.

Faculty members and students expressed enthusiasm at the recent appointment.

"My department is absolutely delighted to have him as a senior Faculty member," said Christine M. Korsgaard, professor of philosophy and the department chair.

"I think it's a wonderful thing," Goldfarb said. "He's an extremely prominent philosopher."

One of Heck's former students, Christopher F. Nguyen '99, said he was overjoyed to hear that Heck had received tenure.

"He's a very intelligent and capable professor," Nguyen said. "But I hear that he's at the top of his field. People say that he is one of the top philosophers of his generation."

Heck, who learned of the University's decision last Thursday from Korsgaard, would not say whether he would accept the offer. Before he announces his decision, he said he has to meet with Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles to discuss the details.

But Heck said he is extremely happy about the offer. "I am very pleased," he said. "It has been many years since anyone in philosophy was offered tenure 'from inside', as they say," he said.

Since 1991, three junior Faculty members in the department have received a recommendation for tenure from the department. Heck is the only one to actually be offered a full professorship, according to Korsgaard.

Goldfarb said four junior Faculty members in the department who were not offered tenure in the last eight years are now tenured at the University of Pennsylvania, Oxford University in England, the University of California at Los Angeles and Cornell University.

The reason few junior Faculty are

tenured is because Harvard is extremelyselective, he said.

"They take the top scholars from the academicgeneration up for consideration whether they areat Stanford, Yale, or Harvard," he said. "That'sthe beauty of the way Harvard selects Faculty.They go for the best."

Some of Heck's recent publications include "TheDevelopment of Arithmetic in Frege'sGrundgesetze der Arithmetik," and an essayentitled "The Sense of Communication."

Heck graduated from Duke University with adegree in mathematics in 1985. He received aB.Phil. in philosophy from Oxford in 1987 and aPh.D. in philosophy from MIT in 1991.

"I've been at Harvard since," Heck said