Jerry A. Fodor, one of the world’s foremost philosophers of mind, who brought the workings of 20th-century computer technology to bear on ancient questions about the structure of human cognition, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease and a recent stroke, his wife, Janet Dean Fodor, said.

A longtime faculty member of Rutgers University, Dr. Fodor was at his death the State of New Jersey professor of philosophy there. His work, begun in the 1960s and dovetailing with linguistics, logic, semiotics, psychology, anthropology, computer science, artificial intelligence and other fields, is widely credited with having helped seed the emerging discipline of cognitive science.

“He basically created the field of philosophy of psychology,” Ernie Lepore, a philosopher at Rutgers and a frequent collaborator, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “If the study of the mind has been dominant in the last 30 or 40 years of philosophy, it’s really a function of Fodor’s influence.”