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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48Quine and His Place in History (edited book)Palgrave. 2014.Containing three previously unpublished papers by W.V. Quine as well as historical, exegetical, and critical papers by several leading Quine scholars including Hylton, Ebbs, and Ben-Menahem, this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
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40Proust on art and the value of livingEuropean Journal of Philosophy 15 (2). 2007.No abstract available
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14Davidson, Quine, and Our Knowledge of the External WorldPacific Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1): 44-62. 1992.
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296 Assertion as a practiceIn Dirk Greimann & Geo Siegwart (eds.), Truth and Speech Acts: Studies in the Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 5--106. 2007.
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5IntroductionIn Christopher Belshaw & Gary Kemp (eds.), 12 Modern Philosophers, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.This chapter contains sections titled: The Past The Present Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Mind Ethics Philosophy and Culture.
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140Reply to Heck on meaning and truth-conditionsPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (207): 233-236. 2002.Richard Heck has contested my argument that the equation of the meaning of a sentence with its truth-condition implies deflationism, on the ground that the argument does not go through if truth-conditions are understood, in Davidson's style, to be stated by T-sentences. My reply is that Davidsonian theories of meaning do not equate the meaning of a sentence with its truth-condition, and thus that Heck's point does not actually obstruct my argument
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59Quine: a guide for the perplexedContinuum. 2006.Willard Van Orman Quine is one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century.
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87What is This Thing Called Philosophy of Language?Routledge. 2013.Philosophy of language explores some of the fundamental yet most technical problems in philosophy, such as meaning and reference, semantics, and propositional attitudes. Some of its greatest exponents, including Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell are amongst the major figures in the history of philosophy. In this clear and carefully structured introduction to the subject Gary Kemp explains the following key topics: the basic nature of philosophy of language and its historica…Read more
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83Introduction to Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of MuseumsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79 1-12. 2016.Museums and their practices—especially those involving collection, curation and exhibition—generate a host of philosophical questions. Such questions are not limited to the domains of ethics and aesthetics, but go further into the domains of metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of religion. Despite the prominence of museums as public institutions, they have until recently received surprisingly little scrutiny from philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. By bringing together contributio…Read more
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99Quine Versus Davidson: Truth, Reference, and MeaningOxford University Press. 2012.Gary Kemp presents a penetrating investigation of key issues in the philosophy of language, by means of a comparative study of two great figures of late twentieth-century philosophy. He reveals unexplored tensions between the views of Quine and Davidson, and presents a powerful argument in favour of Quine and methodological naturalism.
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12Did Wittgenstein have a Theory of Colour?In Frederik Gierlinger & Štefan Joško Riegelnik (eds.), Wittgenstein on Colour, De Gruyter. pp. 57-66. 2014.
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39Beauty and languageBritish Journal of Aesthetics 47 (3): 258-267. 2007.I argue against Hume and Kant, who maintain that ‘beauty’ expresses a state of the subject, rather than describes features of the object. The word ‘beauty’ is far from being alone in having an expressive dimension, and that which it has falls short of individuating it semantically. Instead, I propose a theory of linguistic idealism with respect to ‘beauty’
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Aesthetics |
20th Century Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |