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48Propositions and reasoning in Russell and FregePacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (3). 1998.Both Russell and Frege were inclined to think that there is nothing essentially linguistic about thought: any actual reliance of ours upon language is a mere psychological contingency. If so then it should be possible to formulate logic in such a way that logical relationships are not represented or expressed as principles pertaining to linguistic forms. Russell and Frege take pains to achieve this, but fail. I explain this by looking at some features of Grundgesetz and Principia . Their failure…Read more
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48Quine and His Place in History (edited book)Palgrave. 2014.Containing three previously unpublished papers by W.V. Quine as well as historical, exegetical, and critical papers by several leading Quine scholars including Hylton, Ebbs, and Ben-Menahem, this volume aims to remedy the comparative lack of historical investigation of Quine and his philosophical context.
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53Review of W. V. Quine, Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays; and, Quine in Dialogue (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (4). 2009.
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Glock’s book is about evenly divided between Quine and Davidson. The central claims are (i) that they are best studied in conjunction; (ii) that they ‘can profitably be seen as logical pragmatists’ (meaning primarily that they view language as action that can be understood or clarified by means of formal logic); (iii) that they ‘combine profound insights with serious distortions’; and (iv) that their respective attempts to ‘accommodate higher phenomena such as meaning and thought within a natura…Read more
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31Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (review)Philosophy and Literature 29 (2): 498-500. 2005.Landy’s book (OUP 2004; 255 pp.+ x) delivers what has gone long and scandalously missing: a philosophical analysis of Proust’s incomparable book that is muscular, concise, philosophically informed and sophisticated; logically rigorous, explanatorily fruitful, and meticulously answerable to its data, namely the text. The philosophy here is not, as often the case in writing about Proust, mere rhetoric or window-dressing, but substantive and literally believable. The book should for a long time be …Read more
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23The Unity of the Proposition in the later WittgensteinConceptus: Zeitschrift Fur Philosophie 40 (97). 2011.
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61The Croce‐Collingwood Theory as TheoryJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61 (2): 171-193. 2003.
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30Quine: Underdetermination and Naturalistic MetaphysicsPhilosophical Topics 43 (1-2): 179-188. 2015.Quine’s naturalism has no room for a point of view outside science from which one might criticize science, or a transcendental point of view from which one could ask questions about the adequacy of science with respect to reality (‘as it is in itself ’). Adrian Moore sniffs out some genuine tensions in this, arguing in effect that Quine is forced by his own views to admit those sorts of questions as legitimate. I venture that Quine, even if he would grant that the posing of such questions is an …Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Aesthetics |
20th Century Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |