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715Identity and Self-KnowledgePhilosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (5). 2017.Self, person, and identity are among the concepts most central to the way humans think about themselves and others. It is often natural in biology to use such concepts; it seems sensible to say, for example, that the job of the immune system is to attack the non-self, but sometimes it attacks the self. But does it make sense to borrow these concepts? Don’t they only pertain to persons, beings with sophisticated minds, and perhaps even souls? I argue that if we focus on the every-day concepts of …Read more
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14The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays, Expanded EditionCenter for the Study of Language and Inf. 2000.No word in English is shorter than the word I.' And yet no word is more important in philosophy. When Descartes said I think therefore I am' he produced something that was both about himself and a universal formula. The word I' is called an indexical' because its meaning always depends on who says it. Other examples of indexicals are you,' here,' this' and now.' John Perry discusses how these kinds of words work, and why they express important philosophical thoughts. He shows that indexicals pos…Read more
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60Wretched subterfuge: a defense of the compatibilism of freedom and natural causationProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 84 (2): 93-113. 2010.
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22Review: David Wiggins, Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 35 (3): 447-448. 1970.
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21The Self Self-knowledgePhilosophy 1-6. 1998.Review Jopling's discussion is carried on with remarkable clarity. His presentation of the diverse philosophical positions is balanced and fair. . . . Self-Knowledge and the Self is a work of excellent, sound scholarship, a most significant contribution. Hazel Barnes, author of Sartre and Flaubert Jopling's book is the most sustained and serious contemporary philosophical reflection on the Delphic injunction Know thyself of which I am aware. Drawing on literature and psychotherapy as well as sol…Read more
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25Equality and education: Remarks on KleinbergerStudies in Philosophy and Education 5 (4): 433-445. 1967.
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63Davidson's Sentences and Wittgenstein's BuildersProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 68 (2). 1994.Words stand for things of various kinds and for various kinds of things. Because words do this, the sentences made up of words mean what they do, and are capable of expressing our thoughts, our beliefs and conjectures, desires and wishes. This simple idea seems right to me, but it flies in the face of formidable authority. In a famous passage in “Reality without Reference,” Donald Davidson criticizes what he calls the “building-block theory:”.
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22Predelli's Threatening Note: Contexts, Utterances, and Tokens in the Philosophy of LanguageJournal of Pragmatics 35 (3): 373--387. 2003.
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60Situation Theory and its Applications Vol. (edited book)CSLI Publications. 1990.Preface This volume represents the proceedings of the First Conference on Situation Theory and Its Applications held by CSLI at Asilomar, California, ...
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98IndexicalsIn Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement, Simon and Schuster Macmillan. pp. 257--258. 1996.
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366Personal identity, memory, and the problem of circularityIn Personal Identity, University of California Press. 1975.
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16The importance of being identicalIn Amélie Rorty (ed.), The Identities of Persons, University of California Press. pp. 67-90. 1976.
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700A Dialogue on Personal Identity and ImmortalityHackett. 1977.A DIALOGUE on PERSONAL IDENTITY and IMMORTALITY This is a record of conversations of Gretchen We/rob, a teacher of philosophy at a small mid- western ...
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198What is information?In Philip P. Hanson (ed.), Information, Language and Cognition, University of British Columbia Press. 1990.
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136Knowledge, Possibility, and ConsciousnessMIT Press. 2001.A defense of antecedent physicalism, which argues against the idea that if everything that goes on in the universe is physical, our consciousness and feelings ..
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41Mary and Max and jack and NedIn Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 2, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 79. 2006.
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205Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising SituationsMidwest Studies in Philosophy 6 (1): 387-404. 1981.
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1334The problem of the essential indexicalNoûs 13 (1): 3-21. 1979.Perry argues that certain sorts of indexicals are 'essential', in the sense that they cannot be eliminated in favor of descriptions. This paper also introduces the influential idea that certain sorts of indexicals play a special role in thought, and have a special connection to action.
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48Myself and "I"In Philosophie in Synthetischer Absicht, . pp. 83--103. 1998.In this essay I distinguish three kinds of self-knowledge. I call these three kinds agent-relative knowledge, self-attached knowledge and knowledge of the person one happens to be. These aspects of self-knowledge dier in how the knower or agent is represented. Most of what I say will be applicable to beliefs as well as knowledge, and to other kinds of attitudes and thoughts, such as desire, as well.1 Agent-relative knowledge is knowledge from the perspective of a particular agent. To have this s…Read more
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419Situations and AttitudesMIT Press. 1983.This volume tackles the slippery subject of 'meaning'.
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80Executions, Motivations, and AccomplishmentsPhilosophical Review 102 (4). 1993.Brutus wanted to kill Caesar. He believed that Caesar was an ordinary mortal, and that, given this, stabbing him (by which we mean plunging a knife into his heart) was a way of killing him. He thought that he could stab Caesar, for he remembered that he had a knife and saw that Caesar was standing next to him on his left, in the Forum. So Brutus was motivated to stab the man to his left. He did so, thereby killing Caesar.
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8Circumstantial attitudes and benevolent cognitionIn Jeremy Butterfield (ed.), Language, mind and logic, Cambridge University Press. 1986.From: _Language, Mind and Logic_, edited by Jeremy Butter?eld. 123.
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88Using IndexicalsIn Michael Devitt & Richard Hanley (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 314--334. 2006.In this essay I examine how we use indexicals. The key function of indexicals, I claim, is to help the audience --- that is the hearers or readers of the utterance with whom the speaker intends to be communicating---to find supplementary channels of information about the object to which the indexical refers. To keep the discussion manageable, I will oversimplify the epistemology of conversation. I ignore the fact that people sometimes lie and sometimes make mistakes. I talk freely about what one…Read more
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138Where monsters dwellIn Jerry Seligman & Dag Westerstahl (eds.), Logic, Language and Computation, Center For the Study of Language and Inf. pp. 1--303. 1996.Kaplan says that monsters violate Principle 2 of his theory. Principle 2 is that indexicals, pure and demonstrative alike, are directly referential. In providing this explanation of there being no monsters, Kaplan feels his theory has an advantage over double-indexing theories like Kamp’s or Segerberg’s (or Stalnaker’s), which either embrace monsters or avoid them only by ad hoc stipulation, in the sharp conceptual distinction it draws between circumstances of evaluation and contexts of utteranc…Read more
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89Rip Van winkle and other charactersEuropean Review of Philosophy 2 13-39. 1996.In this essay I first review Kaplan’s theory of linguistic character, and then explain and motivate a concept of doxastic character. I then develop some concepts for dealing with the topic of belief retention and then, finally, discuss Rip Van Winkle. I come down on Kaplan’s side with respect to the Frege-inspired strategy, narrowly construed. But I advocate something like the Frege-inspired strategy, if it is construed more broadly. On my view it is remarkably easy to retain a belief, and I thi…Read more
Stanford, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |