He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and philosophy at Brooklyn College (while working full-time for three years on the Brooklyn waterfront as a member of the International Longshoreman's Union). He earned a doctorate in philosophy at Stanford University with a dissertation titled "Translation and Meaning: An Examination of Quine's Translational Indeterminacy Hypothesis."
Before joining the faculty of the University of Minnesota, Professor Dolan held research and teaching positions (teaching mathematics, computer science, and philosophy and conducting research in computational linguistics, meteorology, and philosophy) at Brooklyn College, MIT, the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller University, and Swarthmore College. He has taught medical ethics at the Mayo Medical School and has taught and served as course director for courses in medical ethics at the Medical School of the University of Minnesota. Each year, he teaches a course in medical ethics in the University of Minnesota's law school.
Dr. Dolan served for three years as associate editor of the MIT journal Computational Linguistics and Mechanical Translation and for seven years as Co-Editor of The Thoreau Quarterly. He is a member of the American Philosophical Association and is one of the few non-Japanese scholars in the Thoreau Society of Japan. His publications include a logic book, Inference and Imagination (Archimedean Point Press, 1994) and a number of articles on medical ethics, philosophy of language, moral philosophy, media studies, pedagogy, and epistemology in various medical, legal, and other scholarly journals.
He has been an invited lecturer at medical schools, hospitals, colleges, universities, and scholarly conferences throughout the United States, including Abbot Northwestern Hospital, Brandeis University, the medical school of the University of California, Davis, the philosophy department of the University of California, Davis, the University of California, Sonoma, the University of Chicago, the City University of New York, Columbia University, the University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Maryland, the medical school of the Mayo Clinic, MIT, the medical school of New York University, the philosophy department of New York University, St Olaf College, the University of St. Thomas, the medical school of Stanford University, the philosophy department of Stanford University, the University of Southern California, Swarthmore College, and the University of Washington.
The academic appointment in which he takes most pride is the position he held as Headmaster of Kenwood Academy, the home school he and his wife conducted for their children from 1975 until 1993.
