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97Perception: Essays After FregeOxford University Press. 2013.Charles Travis presents a series of essays on philosophy of perception, inspired by the insights of Gottlob Frege. He engages with a range of contemporary thinkers, and explores key issues including how perception can make the world bear on what we do or think, and what sorts of capacities we draw on in representing something as (being) something
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Morally alien thoughtIn Tomáš Marvan (ed.), What Determines Content?: The Internalism/Externalism Dispute, Cambridge Scholars Press. 2006.
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21Wittgenstein on Foundations (review)Review of Metaphysics 44 (1): 135-136. 1990.Conway attempts in this book to explain what a form of life is in Wittgenstein's sense. She assigns such forms considerable importance. Her thesis is that Wittgenstein remained traditional in centrally seeking "foundations"; he is untraditional precisely in finding those "foundations" in forms of life, rather than in a world as it is anyway, or, as Kant did, in individual psychology or its possibility.
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121The Inward TurnRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 65 313-349. 2009.Seeing is, or affords, a certain sort of awareness – visual – of one's surroundings. The obvious strategy for saying what one sees, or what would count as seeing something would be to ask what sort of sensitivity to one's surroundings – e.g. the pig before me – would so qualify. Alas, for more than three centuries – at least from Descartes to VE day – it was not so. Philosophers were moved by arguments, rarely stated which concluded that one could not, or never did, see what was before his eyes.…Read more
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392Intentionally Suffering?In Michael O'Sullivan (ed.), ??, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.This is a response to Marie McGinn, who, roughly, lined me up with J. L. Austin over against GEM Anscombe and Wittgenstein on the issue whether perception is (or can be) intentional. I do not mind being aligned with Austin, but argue that this is the wrong way to line things up. I stand equally with Wittgenstein. Anscombe turns out to be odd man out on this one.
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64Thought's footing: a theme in Wittgenstein's philosophical investigationsOxford University Press. 2006.Thought's Footing is an enquiry into the relationship between the ways things are and the way we think and talk about them. It is also a study of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: Charles Travis develops his account of certain key themes into a unified view of the work as a whole. The central question is: how does thought get its footing? How can the thought that things are a certain way be connected to things being that way?
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47Philosophy of language. The proposition's progressIn Abraham Zvie Bar-On (ed.), Grazer Philosophische Studien, Distributed in the U.s.a. By Humanities Press. pp. 143-169. 1986.
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257Meaning’s Role in TruthMind 105 (419): 451-466. 1996.What words mean plays a role in determining when they would be true; but not an exhaustive one. For that role leaves room for variation in truth conditions, with meanings fixed, from one speaking of words to another. What role meaning plays depends on what truth is; on what words, by virtue of meaning what they do are requied to have done (as spoken) in order to have said what is true. There is a deflationist position on what truth is: the notion is exhausted by a given, specified, mass of 'plat…Read more
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320How Logic SpealsIn Alan Berger (ed.), a Festschrift for Hilary Putnam, ??. forthcoming.This is to appear in a Festschrift for Hilary Putnam on his 85th birthday. This is a pre-publication, not final, version.
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61To represent as soIn David K. Levy & Edoardo Zamuner (eds.), Wittgenstein’s Enduring Arguments, Routledge. 2008.Throughout Wittgenstein had Frege in mind. We should too, to understand him. This is as true for Philosophical Investigations as for the Tractatus. In fact, the later work is, in an important way, closer to Frege than the first—even though the Investigations makes a target of what seems a central Fregean idea. It directs Frege’s own ideas at that target, using something deeply right in Frege to undo a misreading of what, rightly read, are mere truisms.
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555As A Matter of FactTruth (Aristotelian Society Publication). 2013.This expounds J.L. Austin's treatment of truth, and compares it with Frege's.
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184Occasion-Sensitivity: Selected EssaysOxford University Press. 2008.Charles Travis presents a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive view of the relation of thought to language. The key idea is "occasion-sensitivity": what it is for words to express a given concept is for them to be apt for contributing to any of many different conditions of correctness (notably truth conditions). Since words mean what they do by expressing a given concept, it follows that meaning does not determine truth conditions. This view ties thoughts less tightly to th…Read more
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50V*—Are Belief Ascriptions Opaque?Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 85 (1): 73-100. 1985.Charles Travis; V*—Are Belief Ascriptions Opaque?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 85, Issue 1, 1 June 1985, Pages 73–100, https://doi.org/10.10.
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157Thought's Social NatureEuropean Journal of Philosophy 19 (4): 585-606. 2010.Abstract: Wittgenstein, throughout his career, was deeply Fregean. Frege thought of thought as essentially social, in this sense: whatever I can think is what others could think, deny, debate, investigate. Such, for him, was one central part of judgement's objectivity. Another was that truths are discovered, not invented: what is true is so, whether recognised as such or not. (Later) Wittgenstein developed Frege's idea of thought as social compatibly with that second part. In this he exploits so…Read more
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744This is a draft of what became a contribution to a virtual symposium on Susanna Siegel's "The Content of Visual Experience". It takes issue with her claims, and arguments, that perceptual experience has representational content
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10PragmaticsIn Bob Hale & Crispin Wright (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Blackwell. pp. 87--107. 1997.
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University of PortoRegular Faculty
UCLA
Department Of Philosophy
Alumnus
London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |