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110Vygotsky and Mead on the self, meaning and internalisationStudies in East European Thought 31 (2): 131-148. 1986.
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198Concepts: Where subjectivism goes wrongPhilosophy 84 (1): 5-29. 2009.The debate about concepts has always been shaped by a contrast between subjectivism, which treats them as phenomena in the mind or head of individuals, and objectivism, which insists that they exist independently of individual minds. The most prominent contemporary version of subjectivism is Fodor's RTM. The Fregean charge against subjectivism is that it cannot do justice to the fact that different individuals can share the same concepts. Proponents of RTM have accepted shareability as a 'non-ne…Read more
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38Review of Howard Wettstein, The Magic Prism: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (12). 2005.
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26Beyond the 'Tractatus' Wars. Edited by Rupert Read and Matthew A. Lavery. Routledge, 2011, pp. 200, £24.99 ISBN: 978-0-415-87440-3 (review)Philosophy 89 (1): 161-165. 2014.
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86Philosophy, Thought and LanguageRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 42 151-. 1997.One of the most striking features of twentieth-century philosophy has been its obsession with language. For the most part, this phenomenon is greeted with hostile incredulity by external observers. Surely, they say, if philosophy is the profound and fundamental discipline which it has purported to be for more than two millennia, it must deal with something more serious than mere words, namely the things they stand for, and ultimately the essence of reality or of the human mind
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34All kinds of nonsenseIn Erich Ammereller & Eugen Fisher (eds.), Wittgenstein at Work: Method in the Philosophical Investigations, Routledge. pp. 221-245. 2004.
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2Necessity and normativityIn Hans D. Sluga & David G. Stern (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, Cambridge University Press. pp. 198--225. 1996.
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172Thought, language, and animalsIn Abraham Zvie Bar-On (ed.), Grazer Philosophische Studien, Distributed in the U.s.a. By Humanities Press. pp. 139-160. 1986.This paper discusses Wittgenstein's ideas about the relation between thought, neurophysiology and language, and about the mental capacities of non-linguistic animals. It deals with his initial espousal and later rejection of a 'language of thought', his arguments against the idea that thought requires a medium of images or words, his reasons for resisting the encephalocentric conception of the mind which dominates contemporary philosophy of mind, his mature views about the connection between tho…Read more
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4Dictionnaire WittgensteinEditions Gallimard. 2003.Ce dictionnaire apporte à l'œuvre de Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) ce qui était à ses yeux la chose la plus importante en philosophie, une " vue synoptique ". L'œuvre de Wittgenstein, par son style et son inachèvement, demande beaucoup au lecteur. Ce livre est un véritable guide, dressant la carte de sa philosophie, ou plutôt de ses philosophies, puisque Wittgenstein présente le cas unique d'un grand philosophe auteur de deux philosophies, également influentes, et dont la seconde est largement…Read more
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Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein: Language as Representation and WillIn Christopher Janaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, Cambridge University Press. pp. 422--458. 1999.
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1Concepts: Between the Subjective and the ObjectiveIn John Cottingham & Peter Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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92Reasons for Action: Wittgensteinian and Davidsonian perspectives in historical, meta-philosophical and philosophical contextNordic Wittgenstein Review 3 (1): 7-46. 2014.My paper reflects on the debate about reasons for action and action explanations between Wittgensteinian teleological approaches and causalist theories inspired by Davidson. After a brief discussion of similarities and differences in the philosophy of language, I sketch the prehistory and history of the controversy. I show that the conflict between Wittgenstein and Davidson revolves neither around revisionism nor around naturalism. Even in the philosophy of mind and action, Davidson is not as re…Read more
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78A radical interpretation of Davidson: Reply to AlvarezPhilosophical Quarterly 45 (179): 206-212. 1995.The paper is a reply to the accusation ("Philosophical Quarterly", 44, 1994) that my The Indispensability of Translation' ("Philosophical Quartrely", 43, 1993) misrepresents Davidson's account of radical interpretation. It defends my claim that Davidson assimilates everyday understanding to the interpretation of an alien language, and discusses the ways in which he identifies interpretation with translation. I admit that Davidson has recently acknowledged first person authority concerning speake…Read more
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28Propositional Attitudes, Intentional Contents and Other Representationalist MythsIn Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Volker Munz & Annalisa Coliva (eds.), Mind, Language and Action: Proceedings of the 36th International Wittgenstein Symposium, De Gruyter. pp. 523-548. 2015.
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4Wittgenstein on conceptsIn Arif Ahmed (ed.), Wittgenstein's Philosophical investigations: a critical guide, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
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85Wittgenstein and Quine (edited book)Routledge. 1996.This unique study brings together for the first time two of the most important philosophers of this century. Never before have these two thinkers been compared - and commentators' opinions on their relationship differ greatly. Are the views of Wittgenstein and Quine on method and the nature of philosophy comparable or radically opposed? Does Wittgenstein's concept of language engender that of Quine, or threaten its philosophical foundations? An understanding of the similarities and differences b…Read more
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132According to a venerable tradition in philosophy and linguistics, expressions have meaning through being subject to conventions or rules. This claim has become a central topic of contemporary philosophy of language and mind in the wake of Wittgenstein and Kripke, largely because the normativity of meaning is regarded as a serious challenge to naturalism. One reaction to this challenge is to deny that the normativity of meaning is genuine. While there are ‘semantic principles’ specifying conditio…Read more
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14Vygotsky and mead on the self, meaning and internalisationStudies in Soviet Thought 31 (2): 131-148. 1986.
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48The indispensability of translation in Quine and DavidsonPhilosophical Quarterly 44 (171): 194-209. 1994.
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200Doing Good by Splitting Hairs? Analytic Philosophy and Applied EthicsJournal of Applied Philosophy 28 (3): 225-240. 2011.This article explores the connections between analytic philosophy and applied ethics — both historical and substantive. Historically speaking, applied ethics is a child of analytic philosophy. It arose as the result of two factors in the 1960s: the re-emergence of normative ethics on the one hand, and urgent social and political challenges on the other. But is there a significant substantive link between applied ethics and analytic philosophy? I argue that applied ethics inherited important ‘ana…Read more
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191Can Animals Act For Reasons?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 52 (3): 232-254. 2009.This essay argues that non-linguistic animals qualify not just for externalist notions of rationality (maximizing biological fitness or utility), but also for internal ones. They can act for reasons in several senses: their behaviour is subject to intentional explanations, they can act in the light of reasons - provided that the latter are conceived as objective facts rather than subjective mental states - and they can deliberate. Finally, even if they could not, it would still be misguided to m…Read more
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148Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and RealityCambridge University Press. 2003.Quine and Davidson are among the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Their influence on contemporary philosophy is second to none, and their impact is also strongly felt in disciplines such as linguistics and psychology. This book is devoted to both of them, but also questions some of their basic assumptions. Hans-Johann Glock critically scrutinizes their ideas on ontology, truth, necessity, meaning and interpretation, thought and language, and shows that their attempts to accommodate mea…Read more
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80Stroud's Defence of Cartesian Scepticism -A 'Linguistic' ResponsePhilosophical Investigations 13 (1): 44-64. 1990.
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102Animal Minds: A Non-Representationalist ApproachAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 50 (3): 213-232. 2013.Do animals have minds? We have known at least since Aristotle that humans constitute one species of animal. And some benighted contemporaries apart, we also know that most humans have minds. To have any bite, therefore, the question must be restricted to non-human animals, to which I shall henceforth refer simply as "animals." I shall further assume that animals are bereft of linguistic faculties. So, do some animals have minds comparable to those of humans? As regards that question, there are t…Read more
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2Necessity, a priority and analyticity: a Wittgensteinian perspectiveIn Daniel Whiting (ed.), The later Wittgenstein on language, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.